How A Snooty Rich Woman Helped Sara Berner

Radio actors in the Golden Age had to be versatile. That was one way to get steady employment. When you could only hear them and not see them, performers didn’t get typecast. Frank Nelson, Joe Kearns and Elliott Lewis were equally at home on comedy and dramatic programmes.

There were specialists, too, who could spout in different dialects, celebrity impersonators, animal noises or vocal effects.

Sara Berner mastered various accents and celebrities. It helped her land work on radio and in animated cartoons. Director Bob Clampett called Berner “an important voice artist at Warners” and “our female Mel Blanc.” Tex Avery’s recollection was Berner and other actors got $75 a session, with an extra $5 if they did more than one character.

Besides this, there were novelty records, too. Berner managed to attract enough attention that she was given a starring role on her own radio show in 1950-51, though it quickly fizzled. She also had personal and health problems in the ‘50s after marrying her ex-manager.

We’ve reprinted articles on her career before, but let’s give you a few more. This piece is from the Oregon Statesman of Feb. 26, 1937. Major Bowes had a radio amateur hour (later taken to television by his protégé, Ted Mack) which netted him a small mint. He hired his best contestants and put them in little troupes that travelled all over the U.S. to perform in theatres.

Bowes Unit Will Come Next Week
Sara Berner, Who Failed as Salesgirl, One of Stars in Troupe
She mimicked the customers in a department store. So the manager fired her.
But today Sara Berner, young brown-eyed, good-looking brunette, appears before thousands of persons, travels throughout America and makes more than five times the weekly salary she earned as a saleslady—by mimicking.
She entertains Salem theatre fans with Major Bowes all-girl unit which comes to the Capitol theatre for one day only on Friday, March 5.
Miss Berner studied drama two years at Tulsa University in Oklahoma, but family reverses forced her to quit college. Department store salesgirl . . . fired for mimicking . . . New York . . . Job in department store . . . stage frightened amateur broadcasting to millions of listeners . . . a nod from Major Bowes . . . show-girl . . . that's the Horatio Alger story of Sara Berner to date.
With 15 other clever talented young women on the same bill, the Bowes all-girl unit promises to be outstanding among stage presentations.

Keith Scott’s Volume 2 on cartoon voice actors points out Berner’s first role at Warner Bros. was in Daffy Duck in Hollywood (1938) as the hen with the Katherine Hepburn voice. You can hear her at MGM, Columbia and elsewhere. More on that from this feature story published May 1, 1946.

Sara Berner Known As The Voice in Behind Scenes Of Movies
By HAROLD E. SWISHER
Motion Picture Editor of United Press Radio
If Sara Berner had paid any attention to the adage about good little girls should be seen and not heard, she might have got an “A” in deportment, but she would have missed out on a career.
As things have turned out Sara is always heard, but never seen. Which is a pity, because she's a pert and petite redhead, with shining brown eyes.

Long before anybody thought of giving Frank Sinatra the title, Sara Berner was known around Hollywood as the voice. That's because she has been the voice for everything from little Jasper in George Pal’s Paramount Puppetoons, to the tauntingly vocal fish in The Road To Utopia.”
Miss Berner became a career girl by what seemed at the time an unhappy accident. It was 10 years ago and she was a youngster working as a salesgirl at the stocking counter of a Philadelphia department store.
One day a pompus dowager came in, showering snooty syllables all over the place. Sara couldn't resist doing a satirical take off right on the spot. The lady overheard, and the little clerk made a quick sprint to her boss, quitting a split-second before she could be fired.
Next day she went into radio, working 12 hours a day at station WCAU.
Today Miss Berner makes 300 dollars for a one-minute appearance weekly on a top comedy program (the Jack Benny show) where she does a stint as Mabel Clapsaddle, a gum-snapping switchboard operator from Brooklyn. Her chores as Jasper’s voice in “Jasper in the Jam,” and other puppet features, net her a comparably pleasant and rewarding sum.
Of course she hasn’t a thing in the world to cry about, but Sara bawls like baby for a series of radio transcriptions advertising a diaper service.
Among other things, this versatile mimic has been the voice of Universal's Andy Panda, and of Daisy Mae and Pansy Yokum in the “Li’l Abner” series of Columbia cartoons. She has provided voices for dogs and cats, cows and chickens, skunks and foxes, snakes and pigs.
Many’s the fan who delighted in telling about the camel in “The Road To Morocco” who turned to the audience and said: “this is the screwiest picture I’ve ever been in!” That was Sara.
With her talented vocal chords, and somebody else’s art work, she danced with Gene Kelly in “Anchors Aweigh.” She was the mouse, of course. She’s Jerry in the Tom and Jerry shorts, too.
But Jasper is Miss Berner’s favorite assignment. Originally Jasper’s voice was recorded by a little negro boy. But time passed and one day his voice cracked and changed midway through a Jasper film. Then Sara took over.
Only once since the Philadelphia accident has Sara been perturbed -by one of her vocal creations. That was when she did the speaking chores for a vulture. To her horror and consternation, when the vulture spoke from the screen, the voice that emerged was an all too-perfect mimicry of her hardboiled landlady of that time. It’s hardly necessary to add that she has since moved.
And her most valued treasure is a cigaret lighter presented personally by Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King as a token of Canadas gratitude for a series of victory loan shows she did in the dominion.
To the rest of us her top treasure appears to be those versatile vocal chords.

Berner revealed to a Los Angeles Daily News columnist that at WCAU, she was given a 15-minute show that was written by Arthur Q. Bryan, who you know as the eventual voice of Elmer Fudd.

Unfortunately, Berner ran afoul of someone who was normally very dedicated to his cast—Jack Benny. I read a short blurb about it once, but found the specifics in Paul Price’s column in the Daily News of Jan. 18, 1954. Jack was generally dedicated to his cast but would stop calling in someone if they annoyed him. Berner played one of the telephone operators for the final time on radio on Dec. 27, 1953. She was replaced, first on Benny’s TV show.

Benny’s vault doors close on Sara Berner
Those massive doors on Jack Benny's famous vault were creaking so slowly yesterday that they prevented Sara Berner, the original "Mabel Flapsaddle,” from appearing on Jack's TV show.
You might say she was shut out at the safe.

Sara, who originated the character of the gabby telephone operator on Benny’s show some 12 years ago and so far as I know has played Mabel ever since, was dropped from the cast at practically the last minute.
It must have been practically the last minute because Sara’s appearance was widely publicized by the CBS press department until late Friday afternoon. Then there was a sudden switch in plans and the CBS press corps got on the telephone to say that Shirley Mitchell had been substituted.
So. if you missed a familiar face yesterday and thought “Mabel Flapsaddle” looked a little different, here’s the inside story.
SARA NOW, she’s the real flip, talky one and Bee Benadaret [sic] plays the other operator—was called several days ago to do the Benny show. Unfortunately, nobody talked money and Sara assumed she was to get her regular salary for a guest spot.
Somebody on the Benny show, however, assumed otherwise and Sara was offered approximately $250 below her asking price. "That is fine, but not for me,” was Sara’s attitude and who can blame her? After all, in a sense, she represents "Mabel Flapsaddle,” and besides how much difference can $250 make to a major production such as the Benny show?
It was a deadlock, and on Friday Producer Ralph Levy made the switch to Shirley Mitchell. Well, it’s all in a day’s work, but some persons might think that 12 years’ service and identification with a character is worth an extra $250 on an occasional TV show.
Especially when you figure that the budget on the program, excluding air time, must go to $30,000.
Sara took it all in stride, however. She said:
"Well, it’s only money.”
See Jack? Or should it be, see Ralph Levy?

Actually, it should be “See Jack?” There’s no way a casting change like that would be made without Benny’s approval.

Mitchell was Mabel when the character appeared on radio again on Feb. 14, 1954 and until the series ended. Berner was hired only once more for Benny’s radio show, and that was to play the nasal singer in a 1955 episode.

Work dried up. She was in fair condition in hospital in early September 1969 and died just before Christmas, without any notice from Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. Nor any wire service, as best as I can tell. Berner was a fine comic actress and impressionist. She deserved better. At least over the last number of years, as people become interested in the people on radio and in cartoons who made us laugh, Sara Berner is getting some belated recognition.

Answering the Phone on the Radio

A wonderful cast of secondary players populated the Jack Benny radio show, ones who weren’t part of the opening credits. In the post-war years, Mel Blanc was at the top of the list. Jack loved his work so much that Mel would be referred to be name in a number of the shows and he pretty much appeared every week for the last several years.

A few of them, besides Blanc, had several roles on the show, and they included Bea Benaderet and Sara Berner. They became telephone operators at the start of the 1945-46 season. Benaderet stayed until the end, Berner was replaced by Shirley Mitchell in early 1953 in what TV Guide said was a dispute over money.

Their characters moved from NBC to CBS along with the radio show. I don’t recall a reference on the show to their move, though there were some jokes about Bill Paley inducing all kinds of people to switch networks.

Radio Life wrote about them in its issue of November 9, 1947. It doesn’t really say all that much, other than give a few radio credits.

Introducing the Two Very Adept Actresses Who Are Jack's "Number Plee-yuz" Problem
By Judy Maguire
(BUZZERS LOUD, AS IN A SWITCHBOARD)
Bea: Oh, Mabel.
Sara: What is it, Gertrude?
Bea: Your outside line is flashing.
Sara: You get it, will you?
Bea: Okay. (SOUND, CLICK OF PLUG). National Broadcasting Company. Oh, hello. What? Just a minute, I'll connect you. (SOUND, CLICK OF PLUG). Oh, Mabel, it's Mr. Benny.
Sara: I wonder what Spam-face wants now.
Rea: He wants me to connect him with the mimeograph department, because they haven’t delivered his scripts yet.
Sara: Scripts? Well, how do you like that? And he palms himself off as an ad-lib comedian.
Rea: Yeah. He couldn't ad-lib a click if he had false teeth.
Sara: Ain't it the truth.
Bea: But I don't care if he can ad-lib or not. I think he's cute.
Sara: Why should you think he's cute? He's gone out with me more times than he has with you.
Bea: He has not.
Sara: He has too.
Bea: Oh Mabel, let's not argue. When we look like we do we should be happy we've got each other.
Brooklynesing this dialogue for the past three seasons as the sassy PBXers who make Jack Benny's life an open book are two of radio's most adroit character experts. Bea Benaderet, who's "Gertrude Gearshift," and Sara Berner, who's "Mabel Flapsaddle," started as a one-time-only comedy spot with Jack, have been on the show ever since.
Neither of them, incidentally, could operate a switchboard if she tried. NBC knows, because the girls did try, when they took over the station's Hollywood board for some publicity pictures. Bea was pregnant at the time. Photographers, regular operators and press agents had to work around her. In the confusion, cords flew, dialers yelped, ousted "help" tried to save what calls they could, Sara and Bea wailed "What'll we do now?" and one important coast-to-coast executive cooled his heels on a call for a fine ten minutes.
The place has never been the same since, declares NBC's head operator, Billie Clevenger, who is nonetheless the girls' most loyal fan. Coincidentally, another Gertrude (Smith) regularly works the Hollywood Vine and Sunset board right next to Billie.
Not Likes
But, while they're identically gum-popping, short-skirted and flip-commented on the program, Bea and Sara could hardly be paired as like types away from the studio.
Bea, who has just had her hair pouf-cut and dyed a soft feathery red (from its previous long page-boy black) is a swinging, adjusted soul who effects a "gosh, don't mind me" congeniality. She is the very happy wife of Jim Bannon, announcer and actor, and the mother of seven-year-old Jack and five-month-old Maggie. Professionally, she is: "Eve Goodwin" on the "Great Gildersleeve" show; "Mrs. Anderson," henpecker of Dink Trout, on the Dennis Day show; "Mrs. Carstairs" on "Fibber and Molly"; and "Gloria" on "Ozzie and Harriet", as well as one of Benny's switchboard sweeties. She's more interested in her family, she admits, than anything else.
Whereas, little, quiet, big-brown-eyed Sara Berner, by contrast, is absorbed in her career of mimicry. "Sara's a real ham," says Bea with affection. And gentle, soft-voiced Sara will indeed exert any effort to achieve an impersonation of character which has intrigued her.
"I've often wanted to be a telephone operator," she offers with enthusiasm, "so I could listen to all those wonderful people who call in!" Sara spent four years in vaudeville with her "impressions" and traveled the country during the war with them. She's "Little Jasper" on the "Puppetoons." She's the animated mouse who said "Lookit me, I'm dancin' " in "Anchors Aweigh.' She was one of the two talking camels on "The Road to Morocco." And you ought to hear her get going on her take-offs of Edna Mae Oliver, Bette Davis, Mrs. Roosevelt, Una Merkel, Fannie Brice, Gracie Allen! On the air, she plays both Ida and daughter Marilyn Cantor; a complete assortment of colored characters for "Amos 'n' Andy"; Jack Benny's girlfriend "Gladys Zybisco" (in addition to switchboarder "Mabel") ; dramatics and dialects on call.
Sara, who went with the Benny troupe on its tour to Canada, knows a story of the trip that few have heard. On the way out of Corvallis, Oregon, the plane (a giant DC-3) hit a thunderhead, went up 2000 feet, down 2000 feet and finally the pilot turned the ship back.
When they landed again in Corvallis, the entire company piled shiveringly into the town's hotel. "And there in the lobby," relates Sara, "were a whole lot of people sitting around an old radio listening !o the Jack Benny rebroadcast. You can imagine what happened when Jack himself walked in. Nothing in the place was too good for him!
"We all crowded into Jack's room then ... the cast, WAC's and generals from the nearby army camp and folks from all over the town ... for a big party that lasted all night. Wonderful ad-libs! Phil said to Rochester, 'Boy, you look like a bottle of Adohr Milk,' and Roch said, 'Me? No mo' airplane rides fo' me, I'm goin' home by ox.' We blamed the plane trouble on Don . . . he'd just dropped off to sleep in the ship's tail.
"What a night! What a party!" enthuses the little veteran actress who loves every inch of her career. "It was just like being born again!"

Bea Benadaret appeared regularly on television until cancer spread; she died in 1968. Sara Berner did not. She had personal and health issues that made her appearances a rarity; she passed away in 1969.

Don't Call Her Mrs. Camel

It’s feast or famine in the freelance world, and no one learned that better than actress Sara Berner. By 1940, she had been appearing on radio and in cartoons but the Census report for that year shows she made only $1000 from all her jobs in 1939 and hadn’t worked in ten weeks when the census-taker came around. (She did a short tour in a stage show, “Temptations of 1939” and had one shot in a summer replacement show called “Man About Hollywood” among her work that year).

But things picked up. We’ve talked about her career on the blog before, but I’ve saved a couple of newspaper clippings. First comes this column from the National Enterprise Association, March 16, 1944.

IN HOLLYWOOD
Erskine Johnson
NEA Staff Correspondent
The girl with the most photographed voice in America could bite through a nail every time she thinks of it. Why, it was awful. For years she wanted to meet a big studio executive. Then the casting office made a date for her to meet Buddy de Sylva, the big man at Paramount who could make you a star overnight. Her heart started thumping as a casting director took her to de Sylva's office,
“Mr. de Sylva,” said the casting director, “I’d like you to meet Mrs. Camel.”
“Oh-o-o-o-o-o, it was terrible,” Sara Berner said. “I talked to de Sylva for 20 minutes. But everybody called me Mrs. Camel. It was Mrs. Camel this and Mrs. Camel that. Nobody even mentioned my name. Nobody called me Sara Berner. Just Mrs. Camel. Even today when I see Mr. de Sylva on the lot he says, ‘Hello, Mrs. Camel.’ It’s heart-breaking.”
De Sylva, you see, had to approve Sara’s voice as Mrs. Camel for that gag sequence in “The Road to Morocco,” which is why the casting director took Sara to his office.
A Thousand Voices
Her name probably doesn't mean much to you, either. But you’re familiar with her voice in a thousand forms on screen and radio. In fact, she has the most famous voice in Hollywood. She’s the voice of Red Hot Riding Hood in those M-G-M cartoons, the voice of Little Jasper in George Pal’s Puppetoons. She’s Josephine of the Amos and Andy show, Gladys Zybisco of the Jack Benny show.
Being just a voice in a town where faces are so important is paving Sara big dividends.
“I can get even with a lot of people,” Sara chuckled. For instance, those “Speaking of Animals” shorts in which the animals speak. “If I don’t like a girl because she’s catty or something. I just copy her voice for a cat or skunk.”
On The Way Up
Like a lot of other young ladies who are attractive—Sara is very much so—and talented, she wanted to be a great actress when she left home in Tulsa, Okla., for New York. But she got only as far as Philadelphia, where she sold hats in a department store. Then she got an acting job on a radio station, later joined a stage unit and was playing the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles when Hollywood discovered her.
Not long ago Sara received a call from a studio for a role in a picture. “I was thrilled,” she said. “At long last I was to appear in a picture. To have my face on the screen. You don’t know what that means to a voice. Well, the makeup man spent over an hour fixing my hair and putting on my makeup. But all they shot was the back of my head. I was a long distance telephone operator!”
When George Pal first started to make the Little Jasper films they hired a little Negro boy for the voice. By the time they got though, the boy had grown a head taller and his voice was different.
They sent for Sara Berner in a hurry.

And the United Press put this in papers starting December 26, 1944. The reference to Betty Boop is confusing; the Boop cartoons were done on the East Coast and the series had ceased several years before this story was written.

Versatile Sara: Camel One Day, Hippo the Next
By HAZEL HARTZOG
Hollywood, Calif.—(U.P.)—Moviegoers have never seen her face, but just about every one of them has heard Sara Berner’s voice at one time or other. Maybe it was a turtle doing the talking, or a chipmunk, camel or hippo or other animals—but the voice was always Sara’s.
Sara provides vocal chords for most of Hollywood’s familiar cartoon characters. She’s spoken for Red Hot Riding Hood, Little Jasper, Betty Boop and Mother Goose.
And she has verbally caricatured almost every animal known, including the turtle in “The Tortoise and the Hare,” the hippo, elephant and camel in “Speaking of Animals, and the baby panda in the Andy Panda series.
Voice Behind Voice
Currently, Sara is the voice of Jerry Mouse, Gene Kelly’s dancing partner in the cartoon fantasy which high lights “Anchors Aweigh.”
“I’ve been putting words in animals’ mouths for eight years,” the pint sized brunet said.
One of her performances helped win an academy award—that was “Mother Goose Goes Hollywood,” a Disney picture in which she vocally imitated top feminine stars from Shirley Temple to the late Edna Mae Oliver. This winner also spotlighted another Berner talent, that of impersonations.
Has 22 Characterizations
Sara started doing voices for screen animals after a cartoon producer nabbed her from a vaudeville act where she was impersonating Katharine Hepburn. Her first job was being the voice of a baby panda.
From her first cartoon stint, Sara concentrated on animated animals’ voices. She now has 22 characterizations ranging from the thin chirp of a quail to the guttural groan of a crocodile.
Her attorney husband confesses he never knows whose voice will answer the telephone when he calls home.
“It might be Mae West or Bugs Bunny at first,” he said, “but in the end it always turns out to be Sara.”

Incidentally, the man who played Bugs Bunny, Mel Blanc, uniquely listed his occupation in the 1940 Census as “dialectician.” The word certainly fit Sara Berner, and she was one of the best.

The Fall of Sara Berner

She had appeared in films (animated and otherwise), on radio, and had made the transition into television. By 1952, Sara Berner was pretty well-established. Still, she wasn’t a huge star, so she seems to have been an unusual choice to be profiled by Ralph Edwards’ emotional-ambush show “This is Your Life.”

Actually, it may have been because Berner was an easy subject for Edwards and his researchers. Edwards knew her personally. She appeared as a regular on a completely forgotten afternoon TV show that he hosted three times a week on NBC beginning January 14, 1952. And it may have been a case of Ralph Edwards knowing something that others didn’t.

Berner’s appearance popped up on December 10, 1952. Herald-Tribune Syndicate writer John Crosby had something to say about it in his column within five days. Here’s how a jaded reporter reviews what he thinks is a cynical show.

Radio And Television
By JOHN CROSBY
The Laugh, Clown, Laugh Girl
Pathos always sold well on radio, largely dished out on soap opera. The future of the soaps on television is still pretty uncertain but the pathos vein is being worked over extensively.
I suppose the leading contender in this line of work is “Strike It Rich,” where they dig up the victims of the most heart-rending current sob stories, splash them with sympathy and load them down with money.
Close behind “Strike It Rich” in the pathos department is “This is Your Life” which is presided over by Ralph Edwards. Edwards is described at the outset of the program as “your warm-hearted host.”
Well, he’s that all right, a warm-hearted host with a keen sense of double entry bookkeeping. Early in the television sweepstakes Edwards came out with a TV version of his renowned radio show “Truth Or Consequences” where audience participants underwent the most surprising humiliations with great good nature.
THIS SORT of thing apparently either baffled or outraged the television audience, however, and “Truth Or Consequences” fell by the wayside, one of the happiest casualties in my memory.
Mr. Edwards turned to the pathos dodge. “This Is Your Life” reconstructs somebody’s life from front to back. By some manic ingenuity, Mr. Edwards lures on stage an individual who has no idea what is in store.
Let’s say the individual is (as it was last week) Sara Berner, the girl who plays most of the dialect parts on radio. Miss Berner had been enticed down there ostensibly to take part in some monkeyshines about a commercial for Hazel Bishop lipstick.
To be specific, she smothered Mr. Edwards in kisses to demonstrate that Hazel Bishop doesn’t smear. (It doesn’t.)
THAT PART of Miss Berner’s career out of the way, Mr. Edwards told her it was her life that was on the fire that night. She was, to put it mildly, overcome.
“This is a story of courage and comedy, and the tears behind that comedy,” trumpeted Mr. Edwards, overflowing with warm-heartedness. “How many of your really know Sara Berner — the ‘Laugh, Clown, Laugh’ girl — the girl who dreamed of stardom but settled for supporting roles?”
In the heartbreak department, Miss Berner’s career which was then unfolded backwards, didn’t live up to its advance billing. It seemed in retrospect a very pleasant succession of minor triumphs, marred by occasional tragedy (the death of her mother and her first husband).
Mr. Edwards, whose staff is a wizard at collecting friends and relatives of his lifers, trotted out Miss Berner’s present husband who said that “marriage is the one place where Sara is the star.” Spike Jones, with whom she recorded, her dramatic teacher in Tulsa and an old girl friend, June Robbins, whom she hadn’t seen in 10 years.
JACK BENNY — Miss Berner plays the Brooklyn telephone operator from time to time on his show — called to say how much he admired her.
Miss Berner dabbed away at her eyes during all this, exclaiming at one point: “This doesn’t happen until — God forbid — you pass on.”
The freshets of tears grew stronger as the incidents and people dredged up by Edwards receded in time, receded way back to her childhood when she was winning auditions to appear on Major Bowes amateur hour.
At the end. Mr. Edwards in his own words took her “through the archway of your life” into a replica of the kitchen of her Oklahoma home where Mr. Edwards had given refuge to Miss Berner’s brothers and sister and father who fell on her with happy cries.
“The girl that made millions laugh while she was crying,” declared Mr. Edwards.
I don't quite dig this statement, since Miss Berner hadn’t appeared to have done much crying until she got on this show where she did plenty.
ACTUALLY, Sara Berner is an awfully cute trick, a born comic, and a girl who seems to have had a heck of a good time out of this vale of tears. But the customers want pathos and Mr. Edwards, I suppose, has to manufacture it.
“The program,” says a press release, “has substantiated Edwards’ belief that truth is not only stranger but also vastly more powerful than fiction.”
Well, anyhow — it sells Hazel Bishop lipstick.
If you’re a great one for family reunions, this is your dish of tea. It isn’t mine.

But it turns out Ralph Edwards didn’t have to manufacture pathos in Sara Berner’s life. There was enough of it that was eventually played out in the public.

Sara vanished from the Jack Benny show in 1954 and her role as a phone operator opposite Bea Benaderet was taken for more than a full year by Shirley Mitchell. One might think Berner was too busy with television with its memory-work and long rehearsals, but she couldn’t have been busier than Benaderet, who still appeared with Benny while a regular on the Burns and Allen TV show. Erskine Johnson’s Hollywood column in NEA-subscribing newspapers revealed on June 22, 1955:

Jack Benny and Sara Berner, the original Mabel, the telephone operator of his shows, patched up the misunderstanding that’s existed between them for the last year and a half. She returns to the Benny show in a telefilm rolling this month.

What happened? Johnson didn’t say. And, of course, Benny never would have. But there was stuff going on in Sara’s personal life in 1954 that, to jump to conclusions, may have had something to do with it. This appeared in newspapers four years later.

Comedienne Sara Berner Is Granted Divorce
LOS ANGELES, May 8 (AP) — Mrs. Lillian H. Rosner, known professionally as comedienne Sara Berner and as Jack Benny's radio show telephone operator, “Mabel Flapsaddle,” has obtained a divorce.
She charged Milton Rosner, 36, talent agent, with cruelty, namely criticizing and dominating her. They were married at Las Vegas, Nev., in 1951 and separated March 30, 1954.
Mrs. Rosner was given custody of their daughter, Eugenie, 5, $150 a month child support and $150 a month alimony for one year.

Not only was Rosner a talent agent, he was Berner’s talent agent, before and during their separation.

But the story gets sadder, sadder than anything that Ralph Edwards would have dared to broadcast to a television audience. The wire services picked up a story from the Van Nuys News of December 27, 1959.

Actress Pleads Innocent to Endangering Daughter
Actress Sara Berner, who plays a telephone operator on the Jack Benny Show, yesterday pleaded innocent to a charge of endangering the life of her 7-year-old daughter.
A jury trial was scheduled for Jan. 25.
Miss Berner, 47, of 5448 Murietta Ave., Van Nuys, appeared before Municipal Judge William H. Rosenthal, who ordered her returned to Lincoln Heights Jail in lieu of $525 bail.
Phoned Police
Officers E.C. Hayes and George Betsworth received a call on Christmas eve to go to the Murietta Ave. address to check “unknown trouble.”
They were told Mrs. Berner had phoned the Van Nuys Police Station several times earlier asking police protection, claiming her ex-husband, Milton Rosner, 37, was on the way to kill her.
Hayes and Betsworth said they were met at the door by her daughter Eugenia.
They asked for her mother and Mrs. Berner then called from the bedroom for the officers to come in there.
They said Mrs. Berner was in her nightgown and the bedroom was littered with papers, clothing and cigarette butts.
She demanded police protection, insisting her husband was on the way to kill her.
Woman Handcuffed
When the officers tried to reason with her, she became abusive and started screaming.
The officers said it was necessary to handcuff her to restrain her as she allegedly tried to attack them.
The daughter was taken to Juvenile Hall, then turned over to her father.

The Associated Press story on the same incident revealed one other thing—there were bottles strewn over the floor. We’re left to assume they weren’t from soft drinks.

What happened next? From the News of January 26, 1960.

Valley Actress Forfeits Bail
Actress Sara Berner’s bail of $525 was forfeited when she failed to appear in Los Angeles Municipal Court for trial on a charge of endangering the life of her 7-year-old daughter.
Judge Gerald C. Kepple was informed Miss Berner, 47, who played the telephone operator on the Jack Benny show, has been committed to a hospital in San Mateo County.
The actress, of 5448 Murietta Ave., Van Nuys, was arrested Christmas Eve when officers went to her home after she telephoned the Van Nuys station and said her ex-husband was on the way to kill her.
The daughter Eugenia Rosner was taken to Juvenile Hall and later turned over to her father, Milton Rosner, 37.

How long she was in hospital and even why is not known. She likely was moved to the Bay area because she had a sister living in Hillsborough.

Sara’s career through the 1960s was virtually non-existent, at least by a glance of available TV listings. She got good reviews in 1961 as the comic relief, hired as a last-minute emergency fill-in, on the Grammys (the telecast of which, in those days, was way down on the food chain of awards shows), appeared in a dramatic role on “CBS Playhouse” in January 1967 and likely promoted it a month earlier when she dropped in on Gypsy Rose Lee’s daytime show. But that’s all I’ve been able to find.

The News of September 7, 1969 reports Sara in fair condition at Community Hospital of North Hollywood but her father wouldn’t tell the newspaper why, though he mentioned she suffered from arthritis. The News did a follow-up on October 14th.

‘NUMBER, PLEEZE?’
Sara's Mabel Flapsaddle Bedded by Own Phone
By ALICE MORSE
The story was of actress Sara Berner and it ran in a series of supporting players. It was on Page 43 and the magazine was the old Radio Life, now Radio-TV Life. The year was 1943. And of the publication, there’s no one in the world who could top Sara’s quip that this radio actor’s bible “sold at the time for 3 cents.”
Of course this would be if Sara felt up to any kind of gag concerning the old mike days or even the present nonradio nowadays.
For Sara, known to million of both radio and television listeners in those nostalgic days as Mabel Flapsaddle, feels little inclination now to very funny about anything.
Questions Answered
The versatile little actress, whose home is Van Nuys, today is confined to a convalescent home following major surgery. It’s not as funny a place as Jack Benny’s studio where Sara not only convulsed the “39-year-old” comedian at the microphone, but all who worked on the set as well. Sara’s Mabel Flapsaddle had ‘em in the aisles both on and off the air.
And this tribute to the spunky little trouper is in part an answer to uncounted queries as to her present whereabouts and “when is she going to be heard again?”
Sara’s address is Jefferson Convalescent Home, 5240 Sepulveda Blvd., Culver City. The telephone, just waiting to ring, is 391-7263.
Sara, as the oldtimers will remember, is the girl who made hash out of Benny’s attempts to get the right telephone number. As the operator who tangled, literally, with more wires than are pulled by politicians, the actress gave new, electronic meaning to the word “boner” and had fan clubs coming out of the mike.
Now Convalescing
As dialectician par excellence, the little gal from Oklahoma did her stuff regularly on all the top shows and gave 20 of the best years to Benny and Miss Flapsaddle.
She’s now giving a few to herself and the goal is good health again and then, back to work. As for Mabel and her tangled prefixes and loused-up connections, she will never be forgotten. The same goes for Sara.

But she was forgotten. Berner died on December 19th, according to on-line death records, but the wire services never reported it. Her family placed a memorial in the News the following November. And then there was this ad placed in November 1972:



One can only imagine what John Crosby would have thought.

Well, I can’t end this post on a downer. I’ve always been a big fan of Sara’s work in cartoons and on Jack Benny’s show. Here she is in a TV broadcast from October 25, 1951 as Slim-Finger Sara. Her scene starts just after the 13:30 mark.

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The Rise of Sara Berner

“American Idol” existed 80 years ago. Only it wasn’t called “American Idol,” and didn’t have catty judges, perma-smiling hosts or waste time with a lot of build-up-the-sympathy back-stories. It was a stripped down endeavour called “Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour” and was little more than a radio version of vaudeville houses’ amateur nights.

The major would take the ones he found he thought had talent, or were sellable, put them in units and send them performing around the U.S. Some took their talent and moved onward. One was Sara Berner, who toiled for a bunch of cartoon studios and then in network radio.

Sara’s name wasn’t really Sara Berner at all. She was born Lillian Herdan on January 12, 1912 to Sam and Sarah Herdan (Berner was her mother’s maiden name), and was the oldest of at least five children. The family was in Albany, New York in 1920 and Tulsa, Oklahoma 10 years later.

Her best-remembered radio role was when she was paired with Bea Benaderet as phone operators on Jack Benny’s show. They first appeared together on October 30, 1945. Benaderet had replaced Berner as the main female voice in Warner Bros. cartoons only a couple of years earlier. Why Berner dumped her extensive cartoon work, I don’t know.

Perhaps her agent was busy in early 1949 as a number of biographical newspaper articles about her appear. This one is from January 21st.

TRANSRADIO STAR GAZER
By BOB KALB
NEW YORK — Some of the choicest bits of comedy on the Jack Benny show are the laughs emanating tram Mabel Flapsaddle and Gertrude Gearshift, the Brooklynese-voiced telephone biddies who cut in with wisecracks on the Waukegan wit’s conversations. The names this pair sign to their income tax returns are Sara Berner and Bea Benaderet. They are two of radio’s top character actresses. In addition to her stint on the Benny show, Sara has been heard in various roles with Amos & Andy, had her voice sound-tracked into five academy award-winning cartoons, provided the squeaky tones of the animated, mouse which appeared with Gene Kelly in “Anchors Aweigh" and has appeared visually in the film “Gay Intruders” and the upcoming flicker, “The Amboy Dukes.”
Bea Benaderet was a staff member and maid-of-all-trades for a number of years on radio station KFRC, has played varied radio roles, been featured with Orson Welles, and is frequently heard on the “Lux Radio Theatre” and the “Jack Carson Show.” Her future in dramatics was presaged in high school when, as an enthusiastic actress, she played an old man with a beard and won rave notices in the school paper. She’s a native New Yorker. Following her high school graduation she studied dramatics on the West coast and served her apprenticeship in stock companies and with a number of little theatre companies. She landed in Hollywood in 1936 and has been there ever since. Her husband is screen Actor Jim Bannon and they have two children, a boy 8, and an 18 month old daughter.
Sara Berner’s career began less according to formula — to fact as a baby sitter. Her charge was her little brother. Brother loved cowboy pictures and Sara liked vaudeville. The formula became simplified when she discovered he would sit willingly through several showings of a neighborhood horse opera while she adjourned to a nearby movie and stage house. While little brother sat content among the bang-bangs, she could be enthralled by the silent drama and visiting jugglers. When the show was over she would dip off to the powder room and act out the complete show to the wonderment of the attendant. The sight was scarcely less inspiring for casual customers who would walk In to find her gesticulating wildly in the throes of heavy drama.
Before she was through high school her lather moved the family to Tulsa Okla., a locale she best remembers for the opportunity it gave her to play Mrs. Cohen in an amateur production of “Abie’s Irish Rose.” Not necessarily as a result of this appearance, but following it father moved his brood back east again and Sara got a job in a Philadelphia department store. Life was passable as long as she had time to mimic the customers, but on a certain fine day she picked the wrong customer — a main line dowager. In one manner or another she transferred her affections to a local radio station and since, the industry was yet in its infancy, managed to wind up with her own 15 minute program Bolstered by such success, she ditched the deal after a few months and moved to New York City to be close to the hub o£ airwave activities She got a job as salesgirl in a Broadway hat shop.
Selling bonnets in working hours and making the round of talent agencies during lunch produced nothing until she landed by luck on a Major Bowes amateur hour. Her five minute appearance flooded the Major with phone calls and he placed her the following morning in one of his traveling units. Eventually it reached Los Angeles. So did Sara The trip has been paying off ever since.

Here’s another one from the Associated Press.

Hollywood
BY GENE HANDSAKER
HOLLYWOOD, March 22 (AP)—You may know Sara Berner as Mabel Flapsaddle, telephone operator on the Jack Benny show. (“What is it, Goitrude?”) She also plays Jack’s old girl-friend, Gladys Zybisco.
Sara has been doing all right with a Brooklyn accent that is, for her, completely synthetic. In the new picture, “City Across the River,” she plays the proprietress of a cheap soda fountain in a tough tenement section where you’d swear the accents are home-grown.
Yet Sara was reared in Tulsa. Set on entering show business, she went to New York and got a job in a Manhattan lingerie shop. When customers from Brooklyn came in, she jotted their accents on tissue paper linings of stocking boxes. One day she played hookey from the store for an hour or so. The furious proprietor wanted to know where she had been. She had been next door to a theater and had won a Major Bowes amateur audition, with Brooklynese comedy, that started her as a professional dialectician.
Her toughest assignment on the radio was to talk with an Armenian accent. She called all the rug dealers in the phone book to find one who talked that way. The last place listed had a proprietor born, she was told, in Armenia. Sara hurried to the store only to find that the merchant that very day had had all his teeth pulled. He couldn’t speak a syllable. Sara muddled through the program with a mixture of Balkan accents.

And this was in part of an AP television-radio column by Wayne Oliver the same year. You can see how incredibly busy Sara was and also get an indication how she tested her skills.

NEW YORK, Dec. 24—(AP)—You're no doubt familiar with the voice of Mabel Flapsaddle, the telephone operator, and Gladys Zybisco, the girl plumber, on the Jack Benny program. Also Ingrid Mataratza on the Jimmy Durante show, Helen Wilson on Amos ‘N’ Andy, Mrs. Horowitz on Life with Liugi, Chiquita on the Gene Autry program. Also Crystabelle, Geneva Hafter and Aunt Nellie on the Beulah show.
What you may not know is that all these voices—each with its distinctive accent, dialect or personality — belong to one person. She is pert, blonde Sara Berner who can turn different accents on and off as easily as you turn your dial from one station to another.
How does she do it?
“Well, you have to have an ear for it,” she tells this column. “Some people have an ear for music. I have an ear for accents.”
When Miss Berner wants to test the authenticity of her accent, she goes to the region where it is most common. Then she tries her version on a store salesman, ticket seller or someone else who deals with the general public. If she gets a laugh there or is spotted as being from another section, she knows her accent is phony and there's more work to be done.
Although Miss Berner is best known for her Brooklynese on the air, she is from Oklahoma.

Berner’s Major Bowes shows went through 1936 and until about April 1937. They took her to Los Angeles in March the latter year and that may be when she landed some radio work. While her accents got her on radio, and are peppered throughout her cartoon work (the Italian mamma buzzard in “The Bashful Buzzard,” for example), it was her impersonations which originally got her into animation.

The story below from 1944 isn’t altogether accurate.

So Sara Shines
Moviedom Films Yuletide Fairy Stories of Animals
BY TED GILL
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 23—(AP)—This Christmas season has kept Sara Berner busier than a cartoon moth around an animated lighthouse!. . .
Why? . . . because practically every studio has been filming yuletide fairy stories about animals. . . and that's where Sara shines. . .
For eight years, she has been putting words into the mouth's of animals that appear in movie cartoons. . . in fact, she once won an academy award for vocally imitating top feminine stars.
She got her first screen assignment when a film cartoon producer, after hearing her impersonate Katharine Hepburn. . . signed her for the voice of a baby panda. . .

“Life Begins For Andy Panda” was released by Walter in 1939 but she can be heard in Disney (“Mother Goes Goes Hollywood”) and Warner Bros. cartoons the previous year. Animals impersonating Kate Hepburn had made periodic animated appearances, voiced by Elvia Allman, a fine character actress, comedienne and veteran of the Los Angeles radio scene. Internet guessers who post to databases and encyclopaedias can’t seem to tell the two apart. Allman plays a Hepburnish chicken in “A Star is Hatched” (1938) but when a similar chicken appears in “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” only months later, it has Berner’s voice. Berner’s sound is a little higher than lighter than Allman’s.

Historian Keith Scott explains what actually happened. Lantz heard Berner do Hepburn on the Eddie Cantor show, then hired her to do it for “Barnyard Romeo” (1938); the Panda cartoon was, of course, later. She was then hired for the Disney cartoon, then for the Daffy cartoon.

Berner turns up on ‘Fibber McGee and Molly’ in 1939 and it’s almost impossible to list the network radio shows she appeared on. She appeared with Bob Burns, Burns and Allen. She was a hit with a nasal-voiced character on ‘Al Pearce and His Gang’ in 1942 which she later used on the Jack Benny show, even singing with it. She was Bubbles Lowbridge on ‘Nitwit Court’ (1944) with Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan. She showed up on Rudy Vallee’s broadcast of May 10, 1945 with Adolphe Menjou, Irene Ryan and B.S. Pulley, then sued Vallee in October, claiming he reneged on a 39-week contract to pay her $500 a week and credit on each broadcast. Then there was her role as waitress Dreamboat Mulvaney on the 1947 summer show ‘Arthur’s Place’ whose namesake producer-star, Arthur Grant, was suddenly fired after five weeks and replaced with Jack Kirkwood. Berner was a daily regular on the “Anna and Eleanor Roosevelt” daytime show on ABC in 1949, performing Fanny Price’s Indian routine on one 15-minute broadcast.

Two odd radio stories, first from the Valley News of Van Nuys from February 25, 1946.

R A D I O FLASHES
By DICK EISIMINGER
Jack Benny had better be careful what he says to Mabel Clapsadle, one of the telephone operators on his NBC program, for there’s a real Mabel Clapsadle listening in. The two operators, Mabel and Goitrude, played by Sara Berner and Bea Benedaret [sic], have been regulars on the show all season, but it was not until this week that the real Miss Clapsadle appeared. She is secretary to the vice-president of the Security-First National Bank in Hollywood and she has been besieged with calls from friends who wonder if she really knows Jack Benny.

The character’s name on the radio was “Flapsaddle” but there was, indeed, a Mable Clapsadle. U.S government records show she was born in Illinois on August 24, 1895 and died in Los Angeles on September 23, 1972.

And Jimmy Fidler’s column of May 4, 1949 reveals:

Odd results from Hollywood fame. Not long ago, for instance, Sara Berner, the character actress, was a guest on a coast-to-coast radio program. The master of ceremonies, in introducing her to the audience mentioned the fact that she was the “voice” for Jerry, the cartoon mouse that danced with Gene Kelly in one outstanding sequence of “Anchors Aweigh.” A few days after the broadcast, Miss Berner received in the mail a present from a Wisconsin admirer. The package contained an elaborate assortment of cheeses.

The climax of Sara’s career came in 1950. Network radio did for her what it did for Mel Blanc in 1946. It gave her a starring showcase to use her various voices. It gave her a sterling supporting cast. And, like Blanc, she flopped. “Sara’s Private Caper” debuted on June 15th, immediately after “Dragnet.” The show was surrounded in uncertainty. It went through three names before a fourth was finally picked. Radio listings weren’t sure what kind of show it was. Some newspapers called it a drama. Others a comedy. Others a mystery. Others used a combination term. NBC’s publicity department should easily have straightened that out. It’s still a bit disconcerting listening to what’s supposed to be a detective show and hearing laughs. Even what one newspaper preview advertised as Sara’s natural voice sounds like one of her New York dialect characters. The opener featured Gerry Mohr as the bad guy and other voices easily recognisable are Eric Snowden (Ronald Colman’s butler on the Jack Benny show), Frank Nelson (Benny show) and Bob Sweeney of the comedy team Sweeney and March as the boyfriend of the originally-named character: “Sara Berner.” The programme seems to have ended August 24th, though NBC had made some Thursday night switches the week before.

Sara was still busy with the Benny show, television, films and even comedy records—for awhile. But her career wasn’t really the same. And we’ll look at what happened in a future post.

Sara Berner and the R Word

The at-times rancorous debate whether all exaggerated impressions of non-white people are racist (and, conversely, why exaggerated impressions of white people are not) is nothing new, as the article below will show.

Sara Berner was an actress who specialised in exaggerated accents, both on network radio of the Golden Age, and in animated cartoons of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Dialect and ethnic humour was perfectly acceptable (and wildly popular) in vaudeville. Exaggeration equals comedy. But eventually questions were raised about whether the humour was really at someone’s expense or, worse, bigotry. It’s a debate that continues to this day, one that will never result in an agreement. And I certainly don’t propose to debate it here.

What I will do is give you Berner’s take on it, from a United Press story of June 15, 1950.

13 ‘Voices’ Put Sara Berner in Demand for Show Parts
By VIRGINIA MacPHERSON
HOLLYWOOD. (UP) Sara Berner, who makes her living with 13 “voices,” said today she’s won her fight to keep rattling her comedy dialects.
“It’s been tough,” the brown-eyed comedienne explained. Radio bosses didn’t like it. They thought I was fostering racial prejudice.”
Miss Berner thinks different. She thinks she’s breaking it down by cracking wise in Jewish, Italian, Southern, and what-have-you.
So do a lot of top comedians who pay fancy prices for her talented vocal chords.
Jack Benny's had her on for years as “Gladys Zybisco,” his gum-chompin’ telephone operator. She’s “Mrs. Mataratza” with Jimmy Durante, “Helen Wilson” on the “Amos ‘n’Andy” show, “Mrs. Horowitz” on “Life with Luigi” and “Mrs. Jacoby” with Dennis Day.
She's also Gene Autry’s “Chiquita,” Fanny Brice’s “Phoebe” and Eddie Cantor's “Ida” (on the air, that is.)
MANY VOICES
Sara can switch her tonsil tones from Greek to Polish to French without a quiver from her vocal chords.
She’s pretty good at it, too. Good enough, anyway, for NBC to hand her her own half-hour show, “Sara’s Private Caper.”
But for a while there she sure had the big boys along radio row quaking behind their desks.
“Then a columnist had an item about my dialects being in bad taste,” Sara said, “and they ordered me to stop getting laughs with an accent.
“I argued and argued and finally convinced them. Golly, what’s all the fuss about? Dialects are a natural part of American speech.
“And the sooner people stop being on the defensive about them the sooner we can wipe out all that silly prejudice.”
POINTS TO OTHERS
Every time somebody bring up the battle Sara points to “Amos ‘n’ Andy” as the classic example.
“They laugh with Negroes—not at them,” she says. “And that’s the secret with dialects. You have to do them sympathetically. Otherwise you can cause trouble.
“But I know I haven't offended anybody because in all the years I’ve been doing them I’ve never, not even once, got a nasty letter.”
And she’s dead sure she’s getting her negro dialect across okay—the maid in the powder room at Ciro’s won’t ever let Sara tip her.

MacPherson’s made a slight factual error Gladys Zybisko was not one of the phone operators. That was another of Berner’s characters. Zybisko was Jack’s occasional girl-friend on radio.

Berner’s own radio show suffered from a variety of trouble, not the least of which was revealed by columnist Erskine Johnson of the NEA on October 9. He said the show started out as “Sara’s Private Eye,” then became “Sara’s Private File,” was changed to “Sara’s Private Crime” then “Sara’s Private Caper.” By then, it had long been off the air. The final show was broadcast August 24, replaced the following Thursday with ‘Folk Songs of the Menhaden Fishermen.’ It lasted 11 weeks, short even by summer replacement standards. The biggest problem was much like the one Mel Blanc had when he was handed a starring show in 1946—being adept at voices means nothing unless you do something funny or interesting with your characters. And even radio editors had trouble discerning whether “Caper’s” format was a comedy or a drama.

Unfortunately for the gifted Sara Berner, the R Word when it came to her big network break was “replaced.”