Hawaii Welcomes Jack Benny

Television and movie studios weren’t exactly friendly in the early ‘50s, so it was a real coup when Marilyn Monroe guest starred on Jack Benny’s TV show opening the 1953-54 season.

Benny was ideal for any skittish studio. He deliberately made his guest stars look good, and there would be no shortage of plugs during the course of his show.

The show’s basis came from a trip that Benny and his wife Mary Livingstone took to Hawaii with George Burns and Gracie Allen (Marilyn didn’t make the trip). Benny’s and Burns’ clout was so big that the Associated Press reported on June 26th that they were going to Hawaii on vacation.

TV Guide did a photo article on it. Below are some of the pictures that made the publication.



The TV Guide copy: Two of the Nation’s greatest comedy teams, George Burns and Gracie Allen and Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone, spent vacations together at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu. When George and Jack hit the beach, all Hawaii braced itself for a new high in comedy antics. But it turned out that, when clowning for their own amusement, the million-dollar comedians do just about the same stunts as the rest of us. The cameraman caught a fair sampling. As George said to Jack: “We’re here just for fun. What do they want us to do, bring our writers along?”



The island’s newspapers covered the trip; they loved stories about big stars coming. During their stay, Benny got off the best line to a reporter, talking about hula lessons aboard the Lurline, the ship he and Burns took to Honolulu. Neither Jack nor George indulged but Benny related how Eddie Cantor did at one time and “looked like a Mack truck backing into a Jaguar’s parking place.”

The nicest story comes from the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser, July 22, 1953. Read it below. Some of the husband/wife dialogue sounds like it came from a Benny radio show, but it didn’t.

Jack Benny Has Reunion With Former Violin Teacher Here After 45 Years
By BOB KRAUSS
A gag caught up with Jack Benny yesterday and turned out to be a sweet old man with long white hair and a violin under his arm.
For years, Benny has been telling his public that he studied fiddle under the great Prof. Hugo Kortschak. A lot of people who didn’t know anything about music would listen to Benny play and get a big laugh.
Well, there really is a violin teacher named Hugo Kortschak. He's got soft musician's hands and dreamy eyes and a gentle smile. He really did give Jack Benny lessons—45 years ago in Chicago. Now. at 69, he’s retired and lives in Honolulu.
YESTERDAY, HE put on his best cloth cap, locked the front door and took his tiny wife down to the Royal Hawaiian hotel to meet one of his former pupils.
On the way to the hotel, Mrs. Kortschak politely asked a few questions so she wouldn't embarrass Mr. Benny by knowing so little of his work.
"What does he do?" she asked.
"Have you listened to him on the radio?" I said.
"Yes, I believe I heard him once but I didn't know it was he because he was talking. Doesn't he play the violin anymore?"

"WELL, HIS program is mostly talking now," I said.
"What sort of a program is it?"
"It's a comedy program."
"For children?"
"No, it's supposed to be for adults."
Truth of the matter is, Mr. Kortschak had lost track of his pupil until just the other day. Matter of fact, for years he had no idea a radio, movie and TV comedian named Jack Benny had once studied under him.
Other professors—at Yale University where he was professor of violin for 29 years—would tell him this comedian had mentioned his name over the radio. Finally, Mr. Kortschak learned that a youngster named Benny Kubelsky, a former pupil, had taken the name of Jack Benny.
"HE PROBABLY would have gone far," Mr. Kortschak said of Benny Kubelsky. "He showed a lot of promise, no question."
When we got to the hotel, the first thing Mr. Kortschak said to 59-year-old Jack Benny was, "My, you've grown!"
"Well, Prof. Kortschak," Benny said, "I expected a much older person. It was 45 years ago, wasn't it?"
"Yes, a long time."
"You must have been much younger than I thought you were. I was just 15 at that time. "Weren't you teaching at the Chicago Musical College?"
"Yes, yes."
"You know, I still play. Bought a good violin not long ago so now I practice a little every day. I can remember when I was crazy to be a concert violinist. But I'm like most golfers. I like to play but I never practice. You're the last teacher I had. I got into show business somehow and never studied violin since."
BENNY AND Mr. Kortschak chatted for a while about music and Benny's new violin, a French Vuillaume. A little later, everybody shook hands and the Kortschaks went home.
Mrs. Kortschak said she was very favorably impressed with her husband's former pupil, even though their conversation was considerably interrupted by Benny fans who wanted to take pictures.

Gracie had a surprise birthday party thrown for her during the trip. She and Mary flew in to Hawaii while their husbands came by ship and stayed after they left, no doubt to do some shopping. It would appear Jack was soon busy with his writers with some inspirations his vacation left behind.

He Wasn't Quite Mickey

Who has “all the comic seriousness or a Harold Lloyd, the lightning agility of a Douglas Fairbanks, and the grotesquely funny feet of a Charlie Chaplin”?

Would you believe Flip the Frog?

That’s how an English movie trade publication termed him in its edition of May 15, 1930. Mind you, the writer hadn’t seen a Flip cartoon because none of them had appeared in Britain as yet. He was taking the word of a publicity release.

From what I can tell, more has been written about Flip in recent years than when he was actually appearing in theatres. That gives you an idea of the impact he had at the time.

The Motion Picture News reported on February 22, 1930 that Ub Iwerks would be making the cartoons in colour and black and white “in the next few weeks” under the auspices of Celebrity Productions, “current distributors of the Disney cartoons. Definite releasing arrangements subsequently will be announced” with a monthly release beginning “on or about March 1.” Film Daily had the roughly the same story the day before.

The first indication of Flip I can find in the popular press is in the Brooklyn Standard Union of February 26, 1930.

New Films Flip the Frog,
Ub Iwerks Latest Cartoon
By BURKE HENRY
Only a brash reviewer would take it upon himself to analyze the antics of “Mickey Mouse” or the concatenations of the “Silly Symphony,” animated cartoons. Oftimes the cartoons are the only lively events on the program when the feature films fall into the doldrums.
Now comes the announcement that Ub Iwerks, who has been associated with Walt Disney, is to become a producer on his own and for his independent series has chosen animated sound cartoons in color as well as in black and white, to be entitled “Flip the Frog.”
“A frog more nearly represents a human being than anything else in all nature,” Iwerks, speaking from the wisdom of his twenty-eight years of age, declares: “A frog may be the epitome of laziness or lightning-like action as suit his erratic impulses.”

In the Birmingham News of February 24, 1932, Ub’s tale of how Flip was created sounds in league with the stories Walt Disney related over the years about how he invented Mickey Mouse.

TADPOLE INSPIRATION
Flip The Frog Grew From National Early Start
In most countries frog legs are a delicacy enjoyed only by the epicurean who is also the possessor of a fat purse. In all countries where frogs abound, they are (in various states of health) to be found among the treasured possessions of small boys. It remains, however, for the artist U. B. Iwerks to recreate the frog into a signal for mirth for cinema audiences throughout the world in his “Flip the Frog.”
Iwerks first became acquainted with the potentialities of humor in the frog some twenty years ago, when in school he casually slipped a tadpole down the shocked neck of a more studious classmate. The result was untold merriment for all pupils except for the shocker and the shocked Young Iwerks was made to sit in the corner and sport a dunce's cap, following which his rather stern father was obliged to pay a visit to the teacher. It presented a serious problem to youthful Master Iwerks. Says Iwerks concerning this: “It is not therefore remarkable that when I decided to extend my drawing board activities to include the movies, I should have thought of Mr. Frog.”

Back to 1930: the rise of Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies had the major studios itching to release cartoons. Warner Bros. signed with Harman-Ising. Educational signed with Paul Terry and Frank Moser. RKO signed with Charles Mintz to make Toby the Pup. That left the studio where there were more stars than there were in Heaven—MGM. And Celebrity’s Pat Powers had the good fortune to ink a distribution deal with Metro. MGM began showing off something to do with the cartoons at the studio’s convention in Chicago around May 20th. It found space for Flip in advertising its wares in the trades for the 1930-31 season; this ad was in the Motion Picture News of June 14th.

So just when did Flip appear in theatres? There’s no answer in the pioneer reference book Of Mice and Magic; Leonard Maltin and his researchers merely list copyright dates. The Los Angeles Evening Express of May 2, 1930 reported:

FIRST COLOR CARTOON
The first all-color talking cartoon has been completed and is ready for release through Celebrity Productions. It is titled “Fiddlesticks” and is the first of the “Flip the Frog” series being produced by U. B. Iwerks. This subject was done entirely in the new Harriscolor process with recording by Cinephone.

Exhibitors Daily Review revealed on May 7th that European rights had been sold ten days after Flip was announced in the trade press. MGM staged a sneak preview of its shorts—where it happened is not reported—but the same paper of August 14th gave a mixed opinion. “Synchronization that is nearly perfect. Mr. Bullfrog is okay.”

Motion Picture News reviewed Fiddlesticks in its issue of August 16, 1930 and in later editions gave that as the release date. Where it was playing is unknown; the Los Angeles Times does not list it in movie theatre ads. The reviewer wasn’t impressed. Under the heading “Same Old Stuff,” he opined:

AND Fiddlesticks to you, Mr. Producer, for being so much like the rest of the cartoonists who have no more sense of originality than cartoon characters have life.
This one, while expertly produced and set to music, has the same line-up of stuff as every other cartoon (but with few exceptions) in the current season’s group. There’s too much sameness in all of them. New ideas are needed, and needed badly. Will get by on a bill needing a light touch.

To the left is an ad from the New York Daily News from Flip’s first appearance in the Big Apple; he premiered on October 3, 1930 (Fiddlesticks had already played a few weeks earlier in Ithaca, New York). Motion Picture News of October 11th reported the theatre grossed $14,000 the first week with Flip on the bill, and in the same issue, previewed the Flip short The Barbershop, praising the ending but pointing out “Except for an element of sameness common to all cartoons, it clicks nicely.”

The animated amphibian continued to show up in theatres, not so much in the media except in the occasional newspaper story that had a paragraph listing theatrical cartoon characters. Variety’s review of The Milkman on July 12, 1932 didn’t mince words: “An insipid and lazily penned cartoon. Easiest the most economical way is to be repetitious so the youngster in this just keeps on dropping milk bottles.” This is the cartoon where the delivery van horse sings the word “hell” and is about to do it again when Flip crashes a bottle on his head.

Flip ran into trouble with the censor in Virginia. The Hollywood Reporter revealed in Fire, Fire, Iwerks was ordered to eliminate a scene where Flip hits another frog over the head with a chamber pot.

Somewhere along the way, it appears Flip stopped being a frog. The MGM opening title card changed from “Flip the Frog” to just “Flip” by the end of 1932 (in The Music Lesson?) and remained that way until the series was dumped. MGM announced on June 27, 1933 that its largest shorts schedule in history would include 13 Willie Whopper cartoons. After 38 shorts, Flip disappeared.

Well, not entirely. Official Films and Blackhawk Films released at least some of the cartoons for the home film/service club market in the 1940s. In the 1950s, the shorts appeared on TV along with Molly Moo Cow, the human Tom and Jerry and other forgotten 1930s stars of the B-list studios. Then animation historians came along in the 1970s and pieced together the history of Flip and the Iwerks studio (Mark Mayerson’s history of MGM cartoons for The Velvet Light Trap in 1978 included a capsule Life of Flip.

And there were later inspirations. Take, for example, the revelation in the New York Times in 2013 that a Lower East Side bar had a cocktail named after Flip, a gin-cucumber mix sweetened with St. Germain, for $12. The Guardian Angels Catholic School in Stittsville, Ontario, staged a carnival in 2014 where contestants use a mallet to send a fake frog named Flip flying into a pot (as best as we can tell, it wasn’t a chamber pot).

Many of the Flips appeared in 1999 in the two-volume DVD set “Cartoons That Time Forgot” in various states of wear. We hope, for the sake for frog and quasi-frog cartoon fans everywhere, the full series of shorts will soon be available.

Note: My thanks to Thunderbean and Jerry Beck for the higher-quality frames you see here.

Wooden Shoes Are Xylophones

Jerry’s magic pencil can create all kinds of things, even if they don’t make much sense. Then again, Pencil Mania is a Van Beuren cartoon, so it doesn’t have to make sense.

Jerry shaves wood off his pencil to create wooden shoes. Then he grabs Tom’s hat (and pulls his nose for no particular reason), touches it with the pencil and out come some kind of bird.



The birds play “Where, Oh Where, Has My Little Dog Gone?” with their bodies. The shoes sound like xylophones. The birds, for added Van Beuren incongruity, wear hats and smoke cigars.



“Rag Doll” by Nacio Herb Brown opens this cartoon when Tom and a cow whose portrait he is painting are dancing. The cow vanishes very early in the cartoon.

John Foster and George Stallings get a “By” credit with the music, as usual, under the superintendence of Gene Rodemich.

Brainstorm

A mangy cat wants to eat, but all there is in the kitchen is a puny, emaciated bird. But then he sees this:



Then the cat gets a brainstorm. Naturally, since this is a Tex Avery cartoon, the word is used literally.



What’s the brainstorm? Back to the bottle.



This truth in advertising sets up the plot of one of Avery’s fan-favourites, King-Size Canary, released in 1947. Heck Allen supplied gags; Bob Bentley, Ray Abrams and Walt Clinton are the animators.

It Beats Being a Dentist

For someone who played a lazy guy, Edgar Buchanan worked an awful lot.

Buchanan will be remembered as Uncle Joe, movin’ kinda slow at the junction, along with a cast of seasoned character actors on Petticoat Junction starting in 1963 to when CBS purged rural shows in 1970. But prior to being cast, he appeared in an estimated 150 TV episodes, in addition to several dozen movies. Buchanan seemed tailor-made for western and country-set shows but his real-life background was in a far different sphere.

Prior to acting, Buchanan was actually Dr. W. Edgar Buchanan. The story is told in this article in the Salt Lake Tribune of November 5, 1963.

Easy-Going Edgar Buchanan Enjoys the Hard Cash
By Richard O. Martin
Tribune Staff Writer
Dr. Edgar Buchanan hasn't pulled a tooth for about 26 years. He's been too busy daydreaming, hunting, fishing, golfing, telling tall tales — and acting.
It's difficult for him to say which of these hobbies he enjoys the most. Although acting happens to be the way he earns a living and has proved to be most profitable, he generally manages not to let it interfere too long with his other pleasurable pastimes.
"I WAS JUST naturally born lazy," says the veteran actor, who discarded his dentist's drill after 10 years of practice in Eugene, Ore., to begin a new career in show business at the age of 34.
"I'm a heck of a dreamer, but don't get the idea that I'm an itinerant loafer," he says.
"I try to make it pay off when I can," he added.
His casual approach to living stems from the fact that he is doing exactly what he has always wanted to do. He doesn't consider acting work.
Nevertheless, he is a skilled craftsman, an inventive performer who always contributes a little extra something to whatever role he happens to play.
IN VIEW OF Mr. Buchanan's avowed laziness, he seems born for the new character he is creating this season on Petticoat Junction (Ch. 5, 7 p.m., Tuesdays), the new comedy series created by Paul Henning, the creator of The Beverly Hillbillies.
PLAYING THE part of daydreaming, cat-napping Uncle Joe — a major supporting character for Bea Benaderet in her starring role as rural hotel proprietress Kate Bradley — is a happy case of type-casting, says the carefree actor.
"Uncle Joe spends half his time dozing away in a wicker rocker on the front porch dreaming up big ideas," he says.
"The only trouble is, he never quite gets around to putting his plans into operation. When he does go into diction he's an hour late and-a dollar short.
"I'M A LOT like that. One of my biggest get - rich - quick schemes was the big strawberry deal, after World War II.
"I got involved with a farmer in the San Fernando Valley, where we were going to make a fortune glowing strawberries.
"After selling 90,000 baskets a season for five years I wound up $7,500 in the hole."
Fortunately, for the nation's economy as well as Mr. Buchanan's, he has stuck to acting. His earnings from more than 150 television shows and 80 feature films have enabled him to enjoy retreats at his ranch in Hidden Hills and his resort home at Lake Arrowhead, Calif., where he can hunt, fish, golf and daydream to his heart's content.

Here’s a syndicated newspaper story that appeared July 12, 1964 (with the accompanying stock photo).

Ed Buchanan Is Happy in Uncle Joe Role
By HANK GRANT
I WAS watching the "Petticoat Junction" cast going through its paces at General Service Studios. Edgar Buchanan, in his role of bumbling Uncle Joe, was convincing Kate (Bea Benaderet) she could get rich if she'd turn her hotel into a honeymoon haven, particularly with the couples he'd be marrying after his appointment as justice of the peace.
To the press agent accompanying me, I noted that Edgar seemed to be getting bigger and bigger roles in the series and a stagehand, obviously an old-timer, retorted: "What do you expect? Edgar's the biggest scene stealer of them all and I was working with him when he stole his first scene over 20 years ago!"
I mentioned this compliment to Edgar. Chuckling in his fascinatingly peculiar, raspy voice, he said, "Some folks have poor memories or maybe they remember only the good things. As a matter of fact, the first picture I did was 'Tear Gas Squad' back in 1939. The critics said it hit a new low for Class C films."

Despite Edgar's modesty in acknowledging his first film effort as a "bomb," he has indeed been a scene stealer in more than 80 feature films and some 150 TV shows. Famed producer-director George Stevens, who sometimes films 20 takes of a scene before he's satisfied, once asked a star to watch Buchanan work and learn something. "There," said Stevens, pointing at Edgar, "is a man with a natural instinct for acting, a gift of timing his every word and gesture almost as if he'd written the script."
Buchanan has no "star" aspirations, being completely happy as a character actor. Not that he isn't now nor hasn't ever been a star. About eight years ago, he was the title star in the "Judge Roy Bean" TV series.
"That," he recalls, "was a fun show. We made about 40 of those half hours at an average of three a week, for $15,000 per show, peanuts, compared to today's going price of $50,000 per half-hour show. I went from being a star in that show to being a featured player in the Hopalong Cassidy series. Made no difference to me, being a star or a featured player.
"Being an actor is all I've ever really wanted. You knew, I was a dentist in Oregon, didn't you? (I didn't know.) Yes, I was a dentist, my father was a dentist and my wife Mildred was a dentist. We got married before we even graduated from dental school.
"Mildred and me, we've got a fine 17-year-old boy who wants to be an actor and why not? Sure beats being a dentist. I was getting a game leg standing on my feet all day. I was getting fat too because who wants to exercise when he stands all day?
"I'll tell you what I tell my son: There's no trick to being an actor if you appraise ail your good features in the same cold light with your bad. I was a character actor at 20, playing elderly roles even then, because I was a slow talker and I had this gravel voice that killed the chance of my ever being a romantic leading man.
"The object of acting is to appear like you're not acting—living the part as they say. Well, the hardest part comes first, seeing your true self, not the irresistible face you imagine you see in the mirror, and projecting that true self in every role you play. There never was any good acting come out of anyone who was concerned about how he looked."
I asked him what he thought about his looks.
"Well," he rasped with a twinkle in his squinting eyes, "I'll just have to confess that my wife says I'm the handsomest man to ever walk on a stage and anyone who calls my wife a liar has got to fight me!"

Petticoat Junction wasn’t full of huge laughs. It was mildly amusing and a little contrived, but it filled the screen for a half hour a week with people you wouldn’t mind knowing if they were real. Many years later, Linda Kaye Henning—the producer’s daughter who was cast as the youngest daughter—insisted the cast really was like a family. It came across on the screen. In an era where there was more and more social unrest, a calm, bucolic programme appealed to many Americans.

Buchanan suffered from spinal fluid problems for a number of years and died not long after a brain operation in 1979 at the age of 76.

Tex is Finally Coming

To the right you see a frame from Daredevil Droopy (1951). Kind of murky. Oh, it’s also a frame you don’t see in some versions of the cartoon because it’s been censored.

Well, finally, it appears this and the remaining works of director Tex Avery during his days at MGM will get a better showing on home video. Daredevil Droopy is one of 19 Avery cartoons that will be released on Blu-Ray in the first volume of a Tex Avery set by the Warner Archive.

They will be made from 4K scans (reduced to 1080p). I can only presume, since I haven’t actually seen what the cartoons will look like, that they’ll be sharp and pristine.

As someone who really likes almost all of Avery’s cartoons, I’m quite happy just to have them restored and available. I am not obsessed with chronological order. I’ve been watching cartoons on TV for more than a half century and they don’t follow some linear time frame. (If it weren’t for animation historians, people wouldn’t know what the chronological order would be anyway). I am not obsessed with bonuses; they’re a nice extra, but I just want to watch the cartoons.

I can only presume again they won’t be full of DVNR. See the frame below from Car of Tomorrow for an example (this will not be on the first volume).



It’s hard to pick a most favourite out of the cartoons on the first set. Red Hot Riding Hood may have been the most publicised Avery cartoon of its day. There are four of the five Screwy Squirrel cartoons. I’ve always liked the early detective spoof Who Killed Who? And I think many fans would rank Bad Luck Blackie among Avery’s best.

There’s still lots of great Avery to come in future volumes. Example?



Oh, right, you can read more about the set on Jerry Beck’s site.

The Bone Ranger

Anyone reasonably familiar with Terrytoons could tell some changes had been made if they watched The Bone Ranger, a 1957 release. Backgrounds were now sketches with variations on one colour. Instead of constant saxophones, a steel guitar and even a viola made appearances to augment the action. Characters had a thick ink line.

Gene Deitch had arrived to shake up the studio and make the cartoons look more modern, despite the same animators, background artists and storymen (augmented with a few hires from UPA). How much of an influence he had on this cartoon, though, is unclear.

The Bone Ranger has an ending which doesn’t remind you of anything in an old Heckle and Jeckle cartoon. A junkyard dog named Sniffer spends the entire cartoon chasing after a bone for his daily meal. He finally achieves his goal. As he’s about to chomp down on it, there’s a sound. There’s a slight eye movement.



Cut to an emaciated whimpering Chihuahua.



The annoyed mongrel tries to shoo him away, but the forlorn Chihuahua licks his leg in friendship.



Sniffer gives in and gives the little dog his bone, sighing in resignation and using his tail as a belt to indicate his stomach is empty.



The hungry dog toddles off. He turns to head into the distance and the background changes colour from brown to blue as Phil Scheib’s orchestra plays a simple and suitable string arrangement.



Scheib does a fine job scoring and arranging this short, which was originally released in Cinemascope. Connie Rasinski directed.

Injun Joe's Secret

Injun Joe is ticklish, reveals the goony western character who “won’t tell” all throughout the cartoon. Then he tickles Injun Joe, who twists and flops into all kind of positions, including inside a stump.



The iris begins to close, but no! The cartoon isn’t over. “Do-um some more,” the coy, giggling Indian (Billy Bletcher) asks the bearded westerner, who indulges. A few more similar tickle drawings and the cartoon ends for sure.



This is Injun Trouble, a 1938 cartoon from Bob Clampett which features two types of animation. One is the stretchy, floppy kind, and the other is fairly realistic when a horse gallops in a cycle.

Chuck Jones and Izzy Ellis get animation screen credits but I imagine Bobe Cannon, John Carey and Norm McCabe worked on it as well.

Carl Stalling fills the soundtrack with his western/rural favourites, including “Jubilo,” “Sun Dance” and, for the prospector/scout/whatever he is, “The Old Apple Tree” on a sweet potato.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: Emergency Numbers

Log Driver’s Waltz may be one of the most popular cartoons to come out of Canada, but that’s not what this post is about.

That cartoon was the creation of John Felix Weldon, a mathematics grad from McGill University in Montreal who won an Oscar in 1979 for the short Special Delivery. But that’s not what this post is about, either.

Weldon spent 33 years at the National Film Board, worked on more than 50 films and animated more than 20. One of them is was Emergency Numbers, made in 1984.

We hope you enjoy it. The very short cartoon is today’s entry in Tralfaz Sunday Theatre.

Double Benny

Celebrities aren’t always the way they’re portrayed in movies, on TV and in the papers. We’ll skip giving you some examples, other than one.

Jack Benny played Jack Benny on the radio. But he didn’t really play Jack Benny. He played a fictionalised person named Jack Benny who shared a few things with the real Jack Benny. Is it a wonder some people really thought Rochester worked for him?

Columnist Jack O’Brian of the Hearst syndicate kind of touched on the idea of two Bennys in his weekend feature story of May 18, 1952. It was accompanied by the Sam Berman drawing of Benny; a little amusing as it was done as publicity art for NBC in 1947, but Benny was working on CBS in 1952. I wish I had a better copy of it. Not all of the funny lines are by O’Brian. The one about “an older sister named Florence” came from at least two Benny radio shows, one guest starring Al Jolson. And, no, the Orpheum circuit didn’t go as far north as Nome.

Scrooge—With String Attached
BY JACK O'BRIAN
ARE there two Jack Bennys?
If there are, Jack prefers that we only know one of them wan enough to recognize publicly.
One of than was born in the little Illinois metropolis of Waukegan. The one we don't know was patted on the bottom and squealed, “Hello, folks,” in the year 1894. The other flunked his arithmetic daily by asserting that now makes him 10 years of age.
The one we know best may not be exactly cheap, but, as his friend George Burns says, Jack has it figured out this way: “If you can't take it with you, why get in the habit of carrying it around?”
Jack wasn't actually an only child. He had a younger sister named Florence. Today, he has an older sister named Florence.

As a young Waukegan blade, Jack wasn’t always destined for the footlights. He once had visions of becoming a banker. His doctor told him to quit when he still was last a teller. Seems Jack got ulcers counting other people’s money.
The snooty small town life was fractured for Jack by World War I. He felt he was really too young to go into service in 1917 but his father didn't. His father also was head of Jack's draft board.
During Jack's first months in the Navy he was given no opportunity to practice or perform on his beloved fiddle. But he did gain experience at a specialized craft that has proved financially handy to him ever since: He was made a laundryman, third class.
He was given instructions how to perform under fire, which later came in handy at the Academy Theatre on 14th St., credited with having the toughest audience of any vaudeville house in the world in those days, including the Orpheum in Nome.
Striding with outward confidence to the center of the stage of this temple of mayhem, Jack uttered his classic ad lib, “Hello, folks,” and promptly was struck with a barrage of catcalls and boos and a small bonanza in perishable vegetables.
The crescendo rose to deafening proportions whereupon Jack took the first of his long pauses that now are part of his trademark. As the boos and rubble began to subside, Jack looked at his watch, saw his scheduled time had elapsed and in flight delivered the second and last ad lib of his life. “Goodbye, folks,” he said.
In 1926 romance struck Jack in the expected Benny fashion. A pretty salesgirl at the silk stocking counter in the May Co. department store waited on him and let drop the bulletin that employes and their relatives received 20 percent off on anything in the store. Jack immediately proposed marriage.
The wedding took place in 1927. Jack presented a strange picture of extreme ecstasy, walking down the aisle with fiddle under chin playing the Wedding March.
In his broadening career as a vaudeville and musical comedy star, Jack naturally became a topic of Broadway chatter. Fred Allen got to know him well and decided Jack was misunderstood.
“Jack isn’t cheap,” Fred said. “He just has short arms and carried his money low in his pockets.”
The Allen-Benny friendship soured into a mutually profitable feud.
When talk came to movies, Jack chattered off to Hollywood, where he discovered ultimately that to win an Oscar for acting you must appear in very serious pictures. Thereupon he appeared in “The Horn Blows at Midnight.” It was made as a comedy but on completion wag a very serious picture indeed.
To this day Jack can’t figure out why he didn't win an Oscar, for no grimmer film ever befell a performer.
When Jack invaded the Columbia Broadcasting System with the biggest financial coup in radio, a multimillion dollar capital gains deal, reporters naturally demanded comment, “Do they really have free parking at CBS?” was all he said.
Now up to his gagwriters’ ulcers in TV. Jack can't wait for color. It will, he said, at last give the public a first gander at his baby blue eyes. They once were described as being “bluer than the thumb of an Eskimo hitch hiker.”
Now about this problem of age—Jack’s own stubborn age of 39:
The records of the Barrison Theatre in Waukegan list a violinist in the pit orchestra with the same name on its 1909 payroll. This would mean that Jack scraped along in, the house band four full years before he was born. Jack thinks this is evidence that he always was ahead of kids his age in Waukegan.
“Salisbury & Benny” was the first public billing of a vaudeville team containing the person of our man. This was in 1911, or, according to Jack's claims based on that 39-year-old birthday this past Feb. 14, one year BEFORE birth.
“Big, apparently for his age—Five-feet-ten—Jack appeared at the Palace Theatre on Broadway in 1914—at the age of four! HIS reckoning.
Still using Jack’s timetable: He was catapulted from his mother’s arms into the U.S. Navy at the age of five, appeared at the Palace for the first time “in one,” meaning a solo comedy spot, at the age of ten, and was married at 14, and went to Hollywood when he was 16. This was in 1929, though Jack disclaims any connection between his arrival in Beverly Hills and the 1929 depression.
That's the Jack Benny we know from stage, radio, TV and films.
The other Jack Benny is another gent entirely, of course, a fellow of 58 who is proud of his years and the fun and satisfaction of entertaining so long and so well.
When he speaks of Rochester at Christmas and flips: “I don't know what to get him. He has nothing,” he is the other cheerful phony Jack Benny. Actually, Rochester has just about everything—a beautiful home, race horses, a $10,000 racing car.
The attractive qualities of Jack Benny were appreciated by the soldiers in World War II and the Korean fracas. He has kept on the move for and with them all over the U. S. and Canada, Africa, Italy, the Middle East, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia and the South Pacific.
Last Summer, he turned down $250,000 worth of bookings, including one at his beloved Palace, to entertain our troops in Korea.
Modest as he is, he probably will blush and disclaim these last few paragraphs. That’s one time when Jack really is tight as heck—when we try to pry from him anecdotes about his nicer, careful hidden side.
But we know you, Jack Benny. Take off the Scrooge’s mask. You may be funnier that way, but you're nicer this way—the real way.