Cartoon Ads, 1936

The Film Daily gave an awful lot of coverage to short films, cartoons included, in the 1930s. Its pages contained blurbs about the studios, lots of reviews of cartoons and, of course, advertising.

Virtually the whole run of the publication through the silent era is available on archive.org but Mr. Scrappyland, Harry McCracken, alerted me to editions from the early sound era, with a good portion of the editions up to the end of 1936 available. They’re invaluable for researchers. Unlike Boxoffice, which has much of its archives on-line, The Film Daily is searchable. And the scans are pretty good, not murky like the ones at the vault at Boxoffice. Want to know when Tex Avery arrived at Leon Schlesinger? When Carlo Vinci left Van Beuren? Who produced the Bonzo series? It’s all there.

The ads are stunning. Many are in full, vibrant colour. And the ones for cartoons feature studio artwork so the characters look like the characters. I’m going to post some from 1936. The worst that can be said is some of the pages are yellowed and the gutter gets in the way so part of the image isn’t there.

The Popeye and Fleischer studios ads were part of an 11-pager by Paramount. Surprisingly, Warners forked out a two-pager for the short “Let it Be Me”—complete with credits.

You can click on any of them to make them larger.















The ads for 1929-30 are interesting. It can’t be under-estimated how Mickey Mouse created a huge demand for sound cartoons and studios started gearing up to make them. We’ll try to post some of those in the not-too-distant future.

What is Offensive Comedy?

Everything in this world offends someone, somewhere. So where should the line be drawn to determine what humour is legitimately offensive?

There probably isn’t an answer to that question any more. But, years ago, Jack Benny had one. He felt common sense should prevail. Maybe it was possible in 1961 when he was interviewed by the National Enterprise Association but far more people today are quick to take umbrage and demand instant mollification.

I’ll simply post Jack’s comments and let you decide for yourself how much, if anything, has changed since this interview.

PERENNIAL JACK BENNY IS VENDOR OF GOOD TASTE
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
Hollywood Correspondent Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
HOLLYWOOD (NEA)—Jack Benny has a vault full of money, shelves loaded with trophies and awards, a record of 29 years on the air—he’s now approaching conclusion of his 11th season on television—and a head full of enthusiasm.
“Next to Bob Hope I’m the biggest ham around,” he laughed to us the other day. “I’m relaxed only when I'm working.”
Seldom topical, never faddish, Jack Benny’s humor always seems to be in style and the years wear as well on his scripts as they do on Jack himself.
THERE’S NO BIG SECRET about it, he admits.
“It’s good taste—good taste is the most important single ingredient.
“Shook value comedy—they call it ‘sick’ comedy today—may make people sit up and take notice at first, but it quickly wears thin.
“Good warm humor, without abuse and in good taste—the ability to laugh at yourself—this can win friends and affection even for a minority group, whether it’s political, religious, racial or some other type of minority.”
THAT GOOD TASTE couldn’t have a better frame than Jack’s show and he’s justly proud when he says:
“Rochester has played my butler for many years but the NAACP has never protested our showing a Negro as a servant. We always let Rochester come out the victor, showing me up as a stupid jerk.
“My home hasn’t been bombed because Dennis Day, an Irishman, is depicted as a silly kid. We don’t get letters from fat people because I always insult Don Wilson.
“Any intelligent person who himself belongs to a minority group is aware of the risk of offending. But it is a shame that people who are capable of handling any situation in good taste, with an understanding of the problems involved, are prohibited from certain types of comedy because others abuse the unwritten rules of common sense.”
Benny pointed out that these restrictions on comedy apply not only to ethnic groups. You seldom see stuttering comedians any more because stutterers in the audience are offended and may not buy the sponsor’s product.
“Unless you’re a Jimmy Durante or a Danny Thomas you don't make jokes about big noses,” he points out, too.
DESPITE THE LIMITATIONS it imposes Benny favors the elimination of any joke, gag or sequence which, within bounds of reason, may offend.
“Let’s face it,” he says, “we’re living in an age when millions of human beings who were villified in concentration camps are trying to establish their right to a decent life. People of one color want the right to use the same railroad station waiting room as people of another color. The world is watching. We must be careful.
“There are enough basic concepts in life to poke fun at. Funny things happen to all of us all the time. The comedian or comedy writer must be alert to these, remember them, and then invent variations on them. If a gag is hurtful, I don’t need it.”
Jack's lucky, of course. The Benny character — stingy, picayunish, vain with no real reason for vanity, intolerant of Rochester and insulting to his announcer, Don Wilson—is familiar to all. He’s milked each gag on the character for more years than most comedians can milk an entire career.

The Stillborn Cartoon Studios

Theatrical cartoon shorts flourished on the West Coast for about three decades. Walt Disney was the leading animation studio, of course, but Warner Bros. (né Leon Schlesinger) arguably had the most popular characters. MGM garnered piles of Oscars. Walter Lantz can be considered an ‘A’ lister, thanks to Woody Woodpecker and lots of TV exposure starting in the late ‘50s.

Then there were places like Ub Iwerks, who petered out in the ‘30s. The Harman-Ising studio got fired by both Schlesinger and MGM in the same decade. And the Mintz studio went through a takeover followed by a revolving door of Columbia management turmoil until it died in the late ‘40s, the front office deciding to contract its cartoons from UPA.

And then there are those that tried to get into game and failed for any number of reasons. One reason was there were only so many studios prepared to release short subjects. Another was the impending war. And perhaps the biggest was it took a while to make any money off cartoons. Unless a company had a thick wallet to begin with (Lantz, for example, shut down for a bit when Universal refused to advance him money) the future couldn’t possibly be bright.

Bob Stokes was one who tried. Stokes had worked for Harman-Ising, Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney but decided in 1940 the time was ripe to make his own theatrical cartoons. Boxoffice magazine of September 14, 1940 contains the following:

STOKES-EDMONDS PRODUCTIONS files incorporation papers and announces plans to produce a series of one-reel Technicolor cartoons starring a semi-human five-year-old girl, “Sassy Sis.” Bob Stokes, former Walt Disney employe, as president, Paul Edmonds, at one time an agent and personal business representative for Boris Morros Productions, is vice-president and treasurer. Herbert T. Silverberg is corporation counsel. Schedule calls for production of 13 one-reelers during the coming year for a major release now being negotiated.

A similar story was contained in the Motion Picture Herald, with a mention that the George R. Bilson office would handle press relations. Stokes-Edmonds got a copyright on Sassy Sis on December 11, 1940. The U.S. Government copyright catalogue lists it under paintings or designs for works of art; presumably the company copyrighted some model sheets. And they went hunting for a voice for Sis. Louella Parsons revealed who it was in her column of September 11, 1940:

If the offers made Shirley Temple were put end to end they would reach to New York and back. The latest and one of the most interesting is made her by Bob Stokes and Paul Edmonds to merely lend her voice to the cartoon character of “Sassy Sis.” In the event the offer is accepted Stokes, who was formerly key man at the Walt Disney studios, says that Shirley, who is now at the awkward age, would keep her contact with the public and not be seen until she is a little older. The character of “Sassy Sis.” is a five-year-old girl who will appear in a series of 13 cartoons made in color. Shirley’s voice is of course known to millions.

But that’s where the trail ends. What happened to his company? What happened to Stokes? Someone out there likely knows. About all I can tell you is during the war, he served with the Photographic Science Lab, Art & Animation Division, USMAS Anacostia. He died in Riverside, California on February 17, 1980, age 71.

Most of the sizeable studios in the late ‘30s-early ‘40s had animation deals wrapped up. The biggest exception was United Artists, which had been distributing Disney cartoons for three years until 1937 and then avoided animation until signing a deal with the Sutherland-Moray studio in 1944 for a stop-motion series. But it wasn’t through a lack of trying.

Walter Winchell’s column reported on May 19, 1937 that U.A. was working on a deal. Then Boxoffice magazine reported on June 19 under the headline “36 on United Artist List With 18 ‘Skippy’ Shorts”:

To replace the Walt Disney short subjects, which will be released by RKO, UA will have 18 “Skippy” cartoons in Technicolor, based on the familiar cartoon strip by Percy Crosby, which Crosby will produce in Hollywood. The Skippys will be released starting August 15, the start of UA’s selling season.

Boxoffice of July 3, 1937 added:

THE FIRST “SKIPPY” UA SUBJECT READY
NEW YORK—“The Dog Catcher,” first of nine animated subjects in Technicolor based on Percy Crosby’s “Skippy” newspaper cartoon strip produced for the United Artists 1937-38 program, has been finished by Mayfair Productions in Hollywood. Norman Stevenson is the general manager of Mayfair and several artists formerly employed by Disney are now working for the new company. The Skippy subjects will be released early in UA’s selling season which starts August 15. The company has five completed Disney cartoons ready for release, with no date set.

“Skippy” may have been the biggest bust in cartoon short history, even more so than Republic’s flirtation with Bob Clampett in the mid-‘40s. United Artists planned to mount a huge push. Our friend Ted Watts points to the book American films in Latin America: The Case History of United Artists Corporation which reveals the following:

Mayfair Productions obtained the franchise to film the cartoons. Crosby had the right of approval and some characters in the first filmed cartoon had to be re-drawn several times before he okayed them. Mayfair was headed by E.C. Simmons, managing director Kenneth McLellan, Norman Stephenson, formerly associated with Disney and by Mr. [Bill] Nolan, the head animator. … The company, with the latest and best mechanical devices, was housed in the UAC Studio and staffed with 4 animators. … [m]any organizations specializing in film animation approached 130 UAC but only Skippy gained its interest. The contract with Mayfair Productions called for the making of 9 films. The negative cost was estimated at no less than $35,000. Additional prints, advertising and other distribution charges were expected to total $60,000.

United Artist’s publicity department talked to its exchanges about a 300 to 400 foot Technicolor trailer, gag advertising stills, and feature stories about Crosby “whom we will build up in the same way we did Walt Disney.” There was even a “Skippy Merchandising Bureau, which is an organization similar to the Kay Kamen Co. handling the Mickey Mouse merchandise.”



The Motion Picture Herald reported the first cartoon was shown to United Artists executives. The National Board of Review magazine that year included a short blurb:

SKIPPY. Percy Crosby’s Skippy, saving the dog from the dog-catcher. Rather different from other cartoons. United Artists.

So what happened?

Boxoffice magazine tells the story on January 15, 1938.

Sell Mayfair Productions Assets at Creditors Meeting All assets, including furniture, materials, supplies, equities and conditional sales contracts of Mayfair Productions, which was organized in early 1937, to produce a series of movie shorts based on the “Skippy” cartoon character, were sold this week at a creditors’ meeting conducted by Benno Brink, referee in bankruptcy. Mayfair held contracts with United Artists for the delivery of two “Skippy” cartoons and had delivered one of them.

Oddly, the one Skippy cartoon was copyright May 9, 1938 by Mayfair Productions, which was supposed to be out of business.

It’d be interesting to learn who else besides Bill Nolan was working for Mayfair. He’s credited with inventing the rubber-hose style of animation in New York in the early ‘20s which was becoming passé toward the end of the ‘30s. Nolan had a parting of the ways with Walter Lantz in 1936.

Oh, to learn the fate of any prints of the cartoon. Unless they’re hiding in a U-A vault somewhere, or Percy Crosby kept a copy and it was passed down to his family, it doesn’t appear any survived. Too bad.

Animation had its A-list and B-list studios and it appears they had at least two that are mere footnotes in cartoon history.

A 2021 UPDATE: Eric Costello has sent along this note on 17 April 2021:

I've actually found an instance where a theater showed one of the United Artists/Mayfair Productions "Skippy" cartoons, the only one that was actually produced, entitled "The Dog Catcher." The Loew's Premier Theater in Brooklyn had it playing on a bill with "The Shopworn Angel" and "Devil's Party" August 25-29, 1938. Which is a bit strange, since this was over a year after the cartoon was produced, and some seven months or so after Mayfair's assets were sold in bankruptcy.

Jerry Beck says a copy exists in the collection of the Library of Congress. So now we know.

A 2024 UPDATE: Devon Baxter says besides Nolan, Emery Hawkins and Dick Bickenbach animated the cartoon, along with another animator whose work looks like a watered-down Jim Tyer.

Baby Boogie

Faux children’s drawings. A story that doesn’t quite make sense. Visual effects for the sake of visual effects. For me, that pretty well sums up “Baby Boogie,” a 1955 effort by UPA.

It’s too bad. I like Jack Easton’s score. And I get what designer Paul Julian was trying to do. “I’m drawing a picture and this is me,” says a little girl as a drawing appears on the screen. The problem is the drawings don’t look like kids’ drawings. They look like an adult trying to mimic how kids draw, which undercuts the whole purpose. How many kids do you know draw like this?



There are bits of humour in the cartoon, but it’s a little hard to get emotionally involved with ugly-scrawls-as-humans. And the basic purpose of this cartoon doesn’t appear to be making the audience laugh or chuckle, it’s to show the world how creative the artists can be with design and colour (Julian was in charge of both).

Little Susan goes out to play with her friends but she gets in a depressive funk. How can you tell? It’s indicated by a line that suddenly swirls around her. It’s representational! It’s creative artistry!




The story is this—Susie keeps wailing to her parents that she wants to know where babies come from. Her dad finally tells her “Babies come from the hospital.” So as she jumps up and down the background changes behind her to a “Hospitl” and she steals a child. Why is she a common thief? “I just got a baby brother at the hospital, like daddy said.” Writers Abe Liss and veteran Leo Salkin have messed up the continuity. There was no mention of a brother. And her father never suggested she become a kidnapper; would any normal child’s mind think that way?

As Susie runs down the stairs from the paediatric ward, the steps form in front of her. Why? It’s creative!



After Susie jumps into a transparent cab, the taxi suddenly develops a yellow body. Why? Because it’s creative!




And when the cars chasing the cab turn on their headlights, all the colours in the drawing change. This isn’t like “Gerald McBoing Boing” where colour augments the mood of a scene. All the change does here is draw attention to itself. It’s more interesting than entertaining.




The ironic ending is fine. Susie gets a brother. “He asks the silliest questions,” she says. He wants to know where babies come from. Though Julian has decided a format change is in order. The two aren’t drawings now. They’re now two still photos with captions.

Fred Grable gets the sold animation credit. Ann Whitfield, the voice of one of Phil Harris and Alice Faye’s daughters on radio, plays the girl. The dad and Faye-soundalike mom aren’t credited but the father sounds familiar from radio.

Tex, I’ll Have the Ham and Eggs

Obvious visual puns in cartoons can be real groaners. The people at Famous Studios (Paramount) treated them like they were really funny, which made them really unfunny.

And then there’s Tex Avery.

Originally, Tex and his writers put a pun on the screen then made fun of it. After a while, he let the audience take it for what it was.

Here’s one from “One Cab's Family,” a remake of sorts of Friz Freleng’s “Streamlined Greta Green” (1937) with Avery-style gags. It would be an eye-roller in a Famous cartoon, but Avery lets it zoom by so far, you don’t have time to groan.

Junior the Aspiring Hot Rod is hopped up on ethyl. Here he comes (in perspective) at a pig and chicken grazing on the country road. Notice the contented look on the pig’s face, then the pain and shock in the next drawing. These are all on ones.










After a brief pause, the plate drops back down. So do the pig and chicken. Sort of.





The camera starts moving in for a close-up before the eggs have even landed to quicken the gag. Then, on to the next one.

Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons and Mike Lah are the animators. Rich Hogan and Roy Williams (Disney) get story credits.

America’s Most Beloved Showman

Why is Jimmy Durante great? I’ve been pondering how to word the answer to that but, in the process, discovered some anonymous newspaper headline writer in 1954 did it for me. In one sentence. It reads:

Jimmy Durante, The People’s Choice For Title Of America’s Most Beloved Showman, Is Real

Durante was around in an era where there were plenty of hammy, corny people on stage—and they wanted you to know they were on stage. They were among the top acts, too. Durante was somehow different. He was hammy and corny too, but there was something down-to-earth about him. He laughed at himself as much as anyone else did. And while he loved to put on a show, it seems he was doing it for the hell of it and not to leave you with the impression he was the epitome of show business in capital letters.

The headline above was one of the many that were printed above a weekend newspaper feature story on Durante by noted reviewer James Bacon, then of the Associated Press.

Perhaps to the dismaying ego of the writer, wire service stories are written to be edited. Writers can’t predict how much space a subscribing paper has, so their stories are generally structured to allow an editor to choose X number of paragraphs and drop the rest. Bacon’s piece on Durante, which appeared in American papers as of December 5, 1954, was no different. So I’ve played news editor and cobbled together all the paragraphs from about a half-dozen differently-chopped versions. I’m sure Bacon—and fans of Durante—would be happy I’ve tried to restore his full story as best as possible. The stock photo of Clayton, Jackson and Durante accompanied the article; I’ve substituted others from the internet for the rest.

EVERYBODY LOVES THE GUY WHO SAYS
‘Goodnight, Mrs. Kalabash’
(Editor’s Note—Things were exceptionally rough for young Jimmy Durante. He not only had to fight his way up New York’s East Side, but he had to do it with the extra handicap of taking piano lessons. Now, at 61, he’s not only one of the world’s great pianists, he’s quite a guy besides.)
By James Bacon
Associated Press Newsfeatures Writer
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 4 (AP)—WHO IS THE MOST BELOVED person in show business?
At least a score in Hollywood, New York or Las Vegas lay claim to the title and all have the press agents to prove it. But the rightful claimant, in most minds, is a little guy with a heart as big as his nose — and no press agent.
Jimmy Durante would be the first to deny that he deserves any such affection. Yet on the wall of his Beverly Hills den hangs a plaque from B'nai B'rith which bestows the accolade on him in gold engraving. It may be significant that the donor is Jewish, the recipient Catholic.
There are a number of reasons why folks feel the way they do.
Durante’s kindness is legendary, his loyalty has a memory that reaches all the way back to his boyhood. He may die broke as a result.
Stagehands get $100 tips after his TV shows. A few years ago he played the London Palladium for four weeks at $10,000 a week. The trip cost him $50,000. He took along 11 friends, only five of whom were needed in the act.
“It was probably da foist and last time any of dese guys would ever get to see Europe,” Jimmy explained.
At 61, an age when he should be slowing down, he still does as many or more benefits than anyone in town. But he avoids the big star-studded affairs, concentrates his talents in such places as obscure parish churches where a pastor needs a little help in building a playground or adding a classroom to a school. As for the big affairs where studio bosses try to outdo each other in commanding talent to appear:
“Dose benefits got too much entertainment,” Durante says. “Why should I knock myself out for millionaires who can afford to pay for entertainment while dese little places that ain’t got none are screamin’ for it? Me and Eddie Jackson always work better in de little spots anyhow."
Jackson is an example of Durante's loyalty. Years ago he and Lou Clayton joined Durante and put on a club act. When Clayton was stricken a few years ago, Durante spent hours at his bedside, was crushed when he died.
Jackson isn’t essential to Durante’s act those days, but he’s on the bill for a steady spot. Jimmy is proud of Jackson’s success on TV, and fades into the background for a moment when he introduces “Eddie Jackson of Clayton, Jackson and Durante.”
HE'S SORRY that Clayton didn’t live to make a comeback in this new medium.
“Lou would have added class to da act,” Jimmy says.
Durante’s boyhood may provide the answer to his character today.
His Lower East Side neighbourhood was as tough as any in New York, and a spawning ground for many hoodlums. Growing up, Jimmy had an extra cross to bear. He was known as the kid who took piano lessons. But now he’s grateful for the insistence of his Italian father that he keep up with his music. Otherwise, he thinks, he might have wound up in Sing Sing, as some of his school chums did.
He could quit with the jokes today, and still be a big star.
“Wit hair,” he conceeds, “I cud be anudder Liberace.”
He’s a legitimate musician, a composer who has written hundreds of songs, including some he made famous. His early years were spent playing in honky tonks, where he was billed as “Ragtime Jimmy, the King of Harlem.” Once, in a Coney Island spot, he teamed up with a singing waiter, a fellow with pop eyes who bounced ail over the floor as he sang. The waiter was Eddie Cantor.
CANTOR RECALLS that musicians from other places used to gather after hours to watch Durante beat out barrelhouse and ragtime rhythms.
“Jimmy was a piano player’s piano player,” says Cantor now. “There was no greater compliment. He was the greatest jazz pianist of that era.”
He still could be, except that his comedy routines won’t let him play more than a few bars at at a time.
Durante and Cantor used to boast to customers that the number never was written that they couldn’t sing and play. It was a gimmick that brought big tips from homesick drunks.
“We could make good 95 per cent of the time,” recalls Cantor, “but once in a while someone would ask for some piece like ‘South Dakota Blues’ which we never heard of. Jimmy would compose the melody on the spot and I would do the same with lyrics. Most of the time, the drunks were happy but once in a while one would squawk. Our stock answer was: ‘Do you mean there are two songs with the same title?’”
When World War I came, Jimmy went in the Army but his knowledge of music got him in the band instead of the Infantry.
“Here I was leadin’ a band I down Broadway to sell liberty bonds. What a war dat was!”
Jimmy took up bandleading after the war, made friends with a strutting singer by the name of Eddie Jackson. Prohibition came and a waiter approached Durante with the idea of opening a speakeasy.
They hired a sign painter to hang up a sign. He couldn’t spell any better than Durante and thus the Club Durant was born. Durante and Jackson didn’t have enough capital to put the extra E on the sign, so it stayed Durant and became one of the landmarks of the prohibition era.
Clayton, one of vaudeville’s top soft shoe dancers, came in later to form the famous team.
At first Durante confined himself to playing the piano and greeting customers. His natural friendliness caused the club trouble in those shaky days. Jackson recalled the time two customers couldn’t get by the doorman.
“Jimmy waved them in, shook hands with them, bought them a round of drinks and the next morning the place was padlocked. They were revenue men.”
Durante played piano for awhile then decided he should try for laughs, too. His roughhouse comedy was timed for that rowdy era. He started playing the piano less and throwing the furniture at drummer Jack Roth more.
Roth, who has been the target for Durante's wild antics for 30 years, claims he's never missed a beat no matter how many things Durante threw at him.
“He only hit me once with the piano top,” says Roth. “It took four stitches to close my head but I kept right on drumming.”
Clayton, Jackson and Durante, along with Texas Guinan, became the top attractions of this giddy period. Sime Silverman, the founder of Variety, became a booster of the three. Soon they were out of the club and playing the Palace.
In this period of 1928-29-30 they would play three shows a day in such legitimate vaudeville theaters as the Palace. In between those legal shows and after midnight they would double into floor shows of such famed Broadway speakeasys as the Silver Slipper and Frivolity.
Their energy was unbelievable. Between the Palace and the speakeasy clubs they were playing from six to eight shows a day between noon and 2 a.m.
Next came Broadway shows and in the early ‘30s the movies beckoned — but only to Durante.
Characteristically, he brought the whole bunch along. Clayton became business manager and when personal appearances or benefits came up, it was Clayton, Jackson and Durante again. Only Clayton’s death in 1950 split them.
DURANTE may have been the big star of pictures and radio but when the trio performed, he was just one of the act.
The town is full of stories about him, some of the best told by Jimmy himself.
‘Way back in 1933, Jimmy met Ethel Barrymore in the MGM casting office.
“A hell of a nice dame,” recalls Jimmy. “She told me how much she and her brudder Jack liked my woik. I told her if dere’s anyt’ing I can do for ya’ — put in a word or somethin’ — I'll do it.”
Durante’s abuse of the king’s English is no affectation. He was brought up on New York’s Lower East Side and quit school in the seventh grade.
But when the Jesuits who run Loyola University of Los Angeles needed somebody for a TV short to plug the educational advantages of the school, they chose Durante.
“The fodders had a lot of trouble with me,” says Jimmy. "I couldn’t pronounce the name of the school. They kept telling me it’s Loyola but I couldn’t say Loyola so I kept calling it Lyola. How about dat? I changed the name of the university.”
ONCE GARRY MOORE, a radio partner of Durante’s, tried to educate Durante so he would pronounce the words right on the radio. It was a hopeless effort and finally one day Durante took Moore aside and said:
“You mean well, kid, and tanks, but if you teach me to say dem words right, we’re both out of a job.”
Durante’s memory, or lack of it, with scripts is famous in television.
“I’m de only comic who don’t need no cards or prompters,” he boasts.
“No wonder,” chimes in partner Eddie Jackson. “You can’t read.”
When Jimmy loses his place in the script, the laughs still fall because no one can get confused quite as hilariously as Jimmy — but it can be a tough spot for a straight guest star.
John Wayne went on one night with Durante in two separate sketches. Jimmy remembered his lines all right, but not in the proper order—or sketch.
"Here I am standing there with egg on my face in the first sketch. If it had been anyone else I would have walked off the stage, but I love the guy so I just stood there looking silly—and an actor with nothing to say can look pretty silly.”
The rabid Durante fan, and there are millions, couldn’t care less about scripts where Durante is concerned. To them, Durante only has to appear and do the same thing week after week — and he often does.
WHAT OTHER COMIC could get by for years, as Durante has, with the same opening and ending and little variation in between? It may come as a revelation to many constant viewers that Durante always starts off with “Ya gotta start each day wid a song,” and then segues into “Let me hear dat note” and “stop da music.”
And his ending, “Goodnight, Mrs. Kalabash, wherever you are,” is easily the most poignant — and oldest — ending in show business.
And who is Mrs. Kalabash?
No one, not even Jackson, knows.
“Many years ago,” confides Jackson, “I asked Jimmy who she was and all he said was, ‘Eddie, be a pal. Don’t ever ask me again’ and I never have.”
Many, who claim to know, say it is just a piece of smart showmanship to put a little heart into the act, also a little mystery, but that it is wholly fictitious. Others say that it is a greeting to a long ago boarding house matron who befriended Jimmy when he was a hungry piano player.
BUT BEST GUESS — and I base that on a reporter’s intuition after asking him the question many times — is that it’s the pet name for his wife, to whom he was very devoted. She died in 1943.
Durante married Jeanne Olson, then a beautiful singer in the night club where the not-too-handsome Jimmy was the pianist. That was 1921.
Other than one rift — when she sued him for separate maintenance for breaking up the furniture — they were much in love. During the last year and a half of her life when she was very ill, Jimmy gave up his career to be at her side.
He never has remarried though in recent years he has squired red-haired Margie Little to premieres and openings. But like anyone else who is friendly with Durante, she must share him along with the rest of the Durante entourage of Jackson, pianist Jules Buffano, drummer Jack Roth, writer Jackie Barnett and a half dozen others.”
“Where Durante goes, everybody goes,” asserts The Schnoz.

Olive Oyl Cuspidor Dance

Does any cartoon character get twisted and turned more than Olive Oyl? The Fleischer animators loved to bend and stretch her pipe-cleaner dimension arms and legs every which way, and a great example is in “Blow Me Down” (1933).

Olive is dancing in a cantina, with her big flat feet flying around as she slides on the floor (the background moves left to right). Then she gets cuspidors stuck on both her feet and tries to dance them off. She grows an extra leg (and cuspidor) in some of the drawings in the process.









Finally, she cartwheels, splits her legs and lands on her butt, still pissed off.




Finally, she makes a long-legged, triumphant leap off camera, even though she hasn’t triumphed at all. The cuspidors are still there.



They sure loved doing things in time to the music at Fleischer. Popeye stomps down the street to the beat. People in the cantina bob in unison to the beat. And Olive, of course, is landing her feet, butt and whatever on the floor to the beat.
Willard Bowsky and Bill Sturm get the animation credits here.

The Arch Supporting Steve Franken

Television of the 1960s was awash with fine comic actors who were cast as one type of character and took it from show to show to show. Steve Franken was one of them. He died of cancer last Friday, according to TV historian and interviewer Stu Shostak of stusshow.com.

Franken was the small screen’s definitive spoiled, snooty mama’s boy, pretty much defining the character as Chatsworth on “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.” That was his big break on TV. He’d been a teenaged stage actor, appearing in productions of “Hansel and Gretel” and “Charley’s Aunt” as a member of the South Hills Players in Charleston, West Virginia in 1952. He parlayed that into a small role in Paul Muni’s “Inherit the Wind” on Broadway in 1955. Walter Winchell pointed out in a column that Franken was born an hour after his mother Edith had seen Muni in “Counsellor at Law.”

Franken was a New Yorker who grew up in the Eton Hall Apartments on 118th Street. He was the son of Merritt Franken, a newspaper reporter who later became director of publicity of Television Programs of America. His dad wasn’t crazy about his son’s chosen profession, as we read in this Panama City News Herald story dated July 7, 1963 about the things a guy has to do on his way to his big break.

YOUNG MAN WITH DOUBLE EXPOSURE
The “inch-by-inch” career of Steve Franken now seems to be leaping and bounding
BY REX POLIER
Fame of a strange sort has come at last to a diminutive former heel packer named Steve Franken.
The 28-year-old actor is known principally to TV viewers as the filthy rich Chatsworth on “The Dobie Gillis Show.” Brooklyn-born Steve made about 45 appearances on the Gillis series, which is now a-dying. He, Dwayne Hickman, and Bob (“Maynard”) Denver were known on the lot as "the world’s oldest teen-agers.”
After working at odd jobs to enable him to speak one-liners on stage in the evening—a career that has progressed “inch by inch,” the young man says slyly—he has now achieved immortality of sorts. Come fall, he’ll apparently be the first performer featured in two TV series at the same time. Both shows are NBC offerings. On one, Steve will have the roll of a wacky Marine lieutenant in a new comedy called “The Lieutenant.” The other show has him portraying a mild biology high school instructor who has Dean Jagger for his principal in “Mr. Novak.”
Steve didn’t deliberately set out to capture the two roles. His experience is typical of a business where you push and shove for a specific thing, only to have an advantage unexpectedly drop in your lap from left field. He did a pilot for one show, then was spotted by someone for the second show. Result: an envied TV double exposure.
A one-time NBC page boy who was almost fired for practicing his German accent on a German-speaking woman, Franken has succeeded in his career by sheer determination. His father, a well-known publicist, did not want him in show business and refused to help him.
Steve’s long, long trial included working in the complaint department at Macy’s in the daytime so he could utter his one-liner at night on Broadway in “Inherit the Wind.” He portrayed an eager-eyed youth who leaped out of the crowd and shouted: “Train coming and I see the smoke way up the track!” For that he got $16 per week. He also recalls standing behind some pretty distinguished actors in the Hollywood unemployment compensation line. “They pay the best unemployment compensation anywhere,” he said.
But Steve’s most fascinating sidelight was at an arch support factory. The factory was operated by some displaced Hungarians in New York, and Steve held the job while trying for the theater.
“I know it sounds like a ‘What’s My Line,’ but it's true,” he said. “I was a heel packer. I stood on my feet all day, and one day I got so tired I sort of sagged. The head arch support man, a master leather craftsman who looked like someone out of the Old Testament, asked: ‘Hey kid, you got hurt fits? Don't worry. I fix.’
“He made me a pair of elaborate arch supports, but when I put them on, they killed me. I stood them all day and almost died. I worried all that night about the sensitive old man, and how he’d feel if I didn’t wear them the next day. I just couldn’t face him, so I never went back.”

Franken soon moved on to play the best man who moves in with his buddy and his new brand-wife on the forgotten 1964 sitcom “Tom, Dick and Mary” (it didn’t have a prayer opposite “The Andy Griffith Show”). He played a doctor. Hollywood maven Rona Barrett, in her column of September 27, 1964, noted the irony that his parents wanted him to be a doctor in the first place (his grandfather was the chiropodist at the Hotel Astor for 33 years). And he was on the way there for a while. Here’s part of her story.

Physically he [Franken] doesn’t remind you of Kildare or Casey. He’s 5 feet 7, 140 pounds and has blue eyes that seem to pop cut at you. But the minute you hear him you can understand why momma and poppa Franken, the latter a Hollywood press agent, wanted little Stevie to be their son, the doctor.
HE’S a sensitive fellow, who’s probably too idealistic for his own good, but just the right type to fit into the idealistic profession of medicine. Only when he hears bells ringing and birds singing does he know he’s in love. At the moment all’s silent on the Franken front.
“I’m beginning to think monogamy is the answer to convenience,” he said staring after a pretty blonde who had just walked by. “It doesn’t pay to be too intellectual,” he then added.
“When I graduated from Cornell University (where he started out being a pre-med student, later switching to English), my BA degree couldn’t get couldn’t get me a doughnut.
“I do believe there’s some truth to the Hegelian theory that one must suffer a little in order to appreciate what he does get. But there is such a thing as diminishing returns. And I can remember in the beginning when going out into the cruel world that I ate less times than more.
“There were months and months during which I couldn’t get a job. When I finally did it was for a hand commercial. And wouldn’t you know it, when I went for the job, they told me my hands were perfect but my fingernails too short. And what made it even worse, I had just cut them for the first time in months earlier that morning.”
During the lean periods, Steve found happiness and contentment as a complaint adjuster at Macy’s and as a heel packer in an arch support factory run by Hungarians who couldn’t speak English.
For the experience in relationship to acting he said, “I’m happiest when I’m working. But an actor’s work is everyone’s business. No one asks the plumber how he fixes a pipe.
“However, it is far better than having a woman want to return her bed after four years because she’s just discovered bed bugs, or having to wear a pair of arch supports that don’t fit you in order to keep a Hungarian arch artisan happy so you can keep a job.”
HE constantly knocks wood in grateful appreciation of the day he finally made Broadway. His first acting experience was as a broom in the “Travels of Lucky Peter.” It wasn’t until after he appeared in “Inherit the Wind” as part of the scenery that his biggest break finally came: a part in Jose Ferrer’s “Edwin Booth.” [1958]
“I was introduced to Ferrer on the phone and before he could ask me any questions, I recited a speech from Richard III and got the part.”
When he finally landed in films, he said, “I had so much fun working that day I felt guilty about taking the money. I wanted to return some of it.”
And today you get the feeling that if he had to work in “Tom, Dick and Mary” for nothing he would. After all, not only is he satisfying his favorite vocation, but his folks can still call him, “Our son, the doctor!”

Franken may be best known for a pile of different roles on “Bewitched,” including one where he’s a smug client of Darren’s who hires a detective to snoop on Samantha. And he played against type in a great turn as the killer in an episode of “Perry Mason” (the one where Perry actually lost at the beginning).

As an actor, it probably gets a little disheartening and unsatisfying playing the same type over and over again. But someone has to have real talent to convince an audience of their portrayal so much they want to see it again and again. They may not be stars but they become a familiar presence in the living room that TV viewers look forward to seeing like a friend who pops over every once in a while. That was Steve Franken.