Bill Cullen, A Born Ham

Who’s the best game show host ever? Easy. Bill Cullen.

Bill always seemed to be having fun on camera and that he enjoyed nothing better than to play games with contestants. He never came across as a phoney, condescending or self-indulgent. And he could blurt out a funny pun or one-liner out of nowhere. To me, there was only one host of “The Price is Right.”—the man who uttered the immortal phrase “Tell him what he wins, Don Pardo!”

I came across a feature story on Cullen in the February 1949 edition of Radio and Television Mirror (“Television” was in smaller letters than “Radio.” Things would soon change). You may appreciate Bill’s talents even more when you read about his creatively irreverent antics during his early radio days. It’s a little long but full of fun and interesting little things you probably have never heard about before.

Bill died on July 7, 1990. There’s really not a place any more on TV for his kind of talent. It’s TV’s loss. Perhaps it’s just as well, as there was only one Bill Cullen.

Bill Cullen TAKES ALL
Radio’s youngest quizmaster never needed a golden spoon—he was born knowing how to be in two places at once
By MARTIN COHEN
BOIL rapidly the following ingredients: a rapier wit, a triple portion of imagination and a dash of pepper.
End result: Bill Cullen, the youngest successful quizmaster on the networks.
At the age of 29, Bill's incisive wit has made him a third degree specialist on radio's two popular quiz programs, Winner Take All and Hit the Jackpot. Groucho Marx calls him the best quizmaster in the business. In all, Bill Cullen does eighteen network shows a week. Not bad for a kid who four years ago was riding herd on a flock of records in Pittsburgh.
And success is easy for Bill. He merely acts natural.
"I'm an extroverted introvert with an inferior superiority complex," Bill explained. "In other words—a born ham."
He began to prove this at an early age in the public schools of Pittsburgh, his home town. He emceed student assemblies, broke up scholastic spelling bees with his clowning, organized shows to buy a new coat of varnish for the gym and when he disagreed with the policy of the official school paper, he published one of his own.
"Besides, I'm restless," Bill said. "I like to get things done in a hurry."
Impatience led him to announce he was quitting school at the age of sixteen. When he couldn't be argued out of it, his father, a practical man, gave Bill a job in his garage and worked him so hard that at the end of five months Bill gladly returned to high school and later went to the University of Pittsburgh.
It was during his high school days that Bill became interested in a radio career. In fact, he talked local merchants into buying the school a public address system so he could work with a microphone. But an automobile accident that left him with a permanent limp confused the next few years of his life.
"While I lay in the hospital for two months," Bill said, "I decided I could do the most good as a doctor."
He registered at Pitt in a pre-medical course. If Bill had worked his way through college selling magazine subscriptions or clerking in a store, he might be William Cullen, M.D. today. Instead he got a radio job for his after-school hours. During the next four years he nearly knocked himself out carrying a full schedule at Pitt and working full time at the station. But he convinced himself that his real interest was radio, not medicine.
Bill remembers well his Pittsburgh experience at WWSW and his friends there well remember him. Cullen's stunts are legendary in Pittsburgh radio. And when they speak of him, it's with the same feeling of awe that old timers have for a hurricane that once ripped through the country.
Because WWSW is an independent station devoting most of its time to news, record shows and sports coverage, Bill's gift of gab was a definite asset. But he would easily get dissatisfied with a program that became routine.
Early in his radio career, he announced a daily program of recorded classical music. He began to doubt the attentiveness of the listeners, so on one program he played Tschaikowsky's Fourth in reverse. There were no repercussions. The following night Bill bought himself a toy whistle and while recorded music of Wagner hit the air. Bill opened his announcer's mike and began to improvise over the Wagner. A few minutes later the phone rang. "What kind of Wagner is that?" a listener demanded.
"This is a new Stan Kenton arrangement," Bill told her politely, hung up and continued tooting his whistle.
Bill's remarkable talent for stepping up to a mike cold and giving colourful and adequate descriptions of a vacant lot surrounded by a blank fence won him the job of assisting the sports announcer. During time-outs and rest periods, he would come on the air with a quick sports resume, then do color. Only twice did he do actual play-by-play reporting and each time it was a catastrophe.
He was assigned to a high school football game that turned out to be a dud. Bored, and realizing that the radio audience must be too, Bill took off his glasses, carefully wiped the lenses and put them in his pocket.
"Now I can't see and the game won't distract me," he said.
WITH that he began to report a football game as he thought it should sound. He excitedly described 50-yard runs for touchdowns, intercepted passes for touchdowns, fumbles over the goal line. At the end of the afternoon, exhausted and hoarse, Bill announced the final score as 35 to 34. Actually it was 7-0.
Bill broadcast one more sports event for WWSW. It was a year later when the station's kindly and patient manager had forgotten the football circus. There was a hockey game to be covered that night and the regular announcer was ill.
"Know anything about ice hockey?" Bill was asked.
"Grew up with the game," he said.
On the way out to Duquesne Gardens that evening, Bill turned to the engineer.
"Ever see a hockey game?" Bill asked.
"No. Did you?"
"No."
It was a rare night for hockey fans. Bill memorized the names of ten players and no matter who was substituted, the original ten made all the plays. Bill called the ice, the field; the puck, a ball. When a player fell, he was "down on the twenty-yard line." If two players scowled at each other. Bill was describing a bloody fist fight. Instead of giving a resume during rest periods, he picked up a newspaper and read Dick "Tracy to the sports listeners.
The pay-off was that died-in-the-rink hockey fans were laughing with him, not at him. The next day sports columnists wrote that it was the most hilarious program they'd ever heard. But the team owner never allowed Cullen in for another broadcast. Reason was that during a dull moment Bill had described the puck soaring into the bleachers and landing in a woman's cup of coffee.
As a practical joker. Bill's imagination kept the entire staff on constant alert. Perhaps it's a trade secret but most excess energy of announcers goes into horseplay—specifically, trying to break up a fellow announcer while he is on the air. Introduced to this aspect of radio, Cullen brought the full force of his imagination into play. Oddly enough, Cullen's zany stunts remind one of the kind of gags credited to Groucho Marx, one of Bill's boosters.
Take the Musical Bus show. Because Bill was on duty at the same time of day, he had to listen to another announcer do this program for months. The Musical Bus started off with recorded sound effects of traffic noise and the motor of a bus. Bill figured the show needed life, made a new recording of sound effects and substituted his platter for the usual one.
The announcer opened with the same stock announcement, "WWSW invites you to ride the musical bus."
The standard effects followed of a bus driving through heavy traffic. Suddenly there was the zoom of a high powered airplane followed by the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun and the explosion of bombs. There was the sound of the bus crashing and people screaming. It was typical Cullen reaction to monotony.
WHILE Bill was in Pittsburgh, war broke out. Not one of his personal battles but the bigger one with Germany and Japan. Bill was classified 4F because of his bad leg. Being kept out of action was an emotional strain on him. He finally found a branch of the army, Specialists Corps, that would take men with physical handicaps. He signed up, but the corps was dissolved. Still a civilian, Bill put all of his money into flying lessons. In a short time he had his pilot license and served as Air Patrol Pilot. He piled up 400 flying hours. He was twenty-two then and developed a serious interest in current events. He asked for and got a nightly news broadcast. Immediately, he broke away from the lazy habit of announcers who read news direct from teletype reports and began to dig into newspapers and periodicals for additional information. In time, he built up a good audience, but it was on this show that another announcer decided to even up some of the gags Bill had pulled.
Since Bill was a whiz at the art of ad lib, it was decided to let him prove it. He walked into the studio one night at 10:45 with fresh-off-the-wire material. He hadn't broadcast more than a sentence when his friends pulled the main light switch and plunged the studio into a blackout. The laughter was loud for a minute but when they quieted down, the pranksters were amazed. They heard Bill's voice coming out of the control room speaker, giving the news completely unperturbed. And he continued to ad lib the news in complete darkness for fifteen minutes.
One of the announcers involved in this gag had the habit of coming on the air each night with, "We have some hot news tonight." The next day he was speaking both literally and figuratively. Bill had soaked part of the manuscript in lighter fluid. As his friend began the broadcast, a match touched the paper. Both the news report and announcer went up in the air.
"You won't last another six weeks," the station manager always told Bill after one of these episodes. But the manager was too good-hearted and Bill was too valuable to be fired. He left Pittsburgh on his own initiative in April of 1944.
"I'm getting a network job in New York," he told them.
Three weeks later he had one.
Actually Bill came to New York cold. He had no prospects and knew no one. At that time Columbia had an "XYZ" system for auditioning announcers. 150 applicants were chosen from records for the "X" group. Out of these 50 would be selected to audition in a "Y" group. Finally, in the "Z" group, there were only three announcers, one of whom got a job.
Bill didn't arrive at the CBS studios until they were down to the "Z" level and there is a lot of talk about how he got in. One story has it that the men were auditioning with recordings and Bill substituted his for one of the finalists. Another rumor says that Bill locked one of the applicants out on a fire escape then took his place. Perhaps neither is true but Bill was in the "Z" group and got the job. "I was hired as a news reporter," Bill said. "Today, I'm still waiting for my first news broadcast."
His first assignment was on a network show, Fun with Dunn. All he had to do was to introduce the show, be quiet for thirteen and a half minutes, then take the show off the air. Keeping quiet for thirteen minutes was a tough assignment for him and one day the producer made the mistake of writing a gag line into the beginning of the show for Bill. When he came to the line, he threw away his script and began to ad lib. Five minutes later the regular show got started and Bill's reputation was established at CBS as an off-the-cuff wit.
A few months later the program was replaced by the show Sing-A-Long and that was replaced and the next program was replaced but Bill continued to stay on till Winner Take All moved into the period. For six months he assisted Ward Wilson on the program. When the format was changed. Bill moved into the quizmaster's job and ever since has done an outstanding job.
"I get a big kick working with contestants on the program," Bill will tell you. "But let's not talk about the regulars."
But Bill will talk about the "regulars," the people who try to make a profession out of contest appearances.
There's a New York model Bill calls Macushlah Jones who sometimes makes up as a bobby soxer, sometimes as a Park Avenue deb. "7-Up" O'Brien is another who always walks into the studio carrying her shoes and crying that she walked a hundred miles to get on the show. There is "Ming Toy" Smith who claimed she was a painter —she'd painted "Men" and "Women" on rest room doors. But Bill spots the regulars and never do they sneak into any of his shows.
BILL'S married now to a lovely vocalist, Carol Ames, who has a lot of talent in her own right. She's sung on the Paul Whiteman and Arthur Godfrey shows and in some of New York's best night clubs.
"I took the initiative in dating Bill," Carol will tell you.
They had met first on a CBS program when Bill was announcing and Carol singing. She took a lot of ribbing from him but they never dated. A year later, Carol was in her apartment listening to the radio when she heard Bill fluff a line. She picked up the phone, got Bill and teased him about it. An hour later they were sitting at a bar.
"That was our first date," Carol said. "And you know how these things are. You can tell from the beginning when you click together."
Bill courted Carol with the same imagination he puts into his shows. On her birthday they took a plane to Boston for dinner.
Last Christmas eve Carol was sharing an apartment with two other girls and had a date to meet Bill in a bar. He was over an hour late. Bill finally showed up apologetic and carrying two big shopping bags. They were her gifts and he suggested she open them. She did. The bags were stuffed with nothing but paper.
"Are you upset?" Bill asked.
"You're better than an hour late, pull a bum gag and ask a foolish question."
"I'm sorry," Bill said remorsefully.
"I'll take you home."
They walked to her apartment silently.
By that time Carol was kicking herself for being a bad sport. But when she walked into the apartment, there was a huge, trimmed Christmas tree staring in her face.
"In all, he had twenty-seven gifts hidden around the room," she said.
THEY saw a lot of each other for two years. When Bill began to talk about marriage, he found Carol willing.
"Look, I'm due for a vacation in a month," he said. "We'll have a quiet ceremony and a real honeymoon."
One month passed, two, three, four and no vacation. Finally, Bill took the matter in his own hands. It was on Wednesday, July 28th of last year.
"Let's get married," he asked Carol.
"With or without a honeymoon."
"When?"
"Today's Wednesday," Bill said, thinking aloud. "How about Friday? Friday's a nice day of the week."
Both knew that any day they got married would be a great day but there was one more angle.
"We'll keep it a secret," they said. "No fuss. No announcements. No publicity."
Bill figured he could knock off after his Friday afternoon show until Sunday evening. It fitted in with Carol's plans because she was appearing daily on the Arthur Godfrey show. Everything was fine until Godfrey sensed Carol's excitement. Before they went on the air Friday he coaxed the secret out of Carol.
"But don't tell anyone," she pleaded.
"Absolutely not," Godfrey promised.
Fifteen minutes later his promise slipped and the whole country knew Bill and Carol would be married that afternoon.
When they arrived at the Park Avenue church a few hours later, there were 500 excited fans on the street.
They had 36 hours alone in Long Island. The following Monday Bill and Carol moved into the Strand Theater with a stage presentation of Winner Take All. After three weeks in the theater, Carol began a singing engagement at the Raleigh Room in the Warwick and Bill settled down to his routine schedule of eighteen weekly shows.
"The first few months of our marriage," Carol said, "we saw less of each other than at any other time."
They live now in a four-room apartment in a Manhattan hotel. Together, Bill and Carol redecorated the living room in Chinese modern.
Decorating is one of his many hobbies along with color photography, magic, sailing, painting, flying and cooking.
"And drugstores," Carol added.
"That's definitely a hobby. He goes out to buy aspirin and comes back with a shopping bag full of gimmicks—eye pads, face cream, tissue, bottle openers. There's no end."
Their best friends, the Todd Russells and John Reed Kings and the Joe Carneys, will tell you that Bill and Carol make a swell couple and will wait a hundred years, if necessary, for their honeymoon. Life's being good to them, even without one.

Incidentally, the photos of the happily-married Cullen feature second wife. The happy part of the marriage didn’t last. He re-married a few years later to the sister-in-law of Cullen’s announcer at the time, fellow game-show host Jack Narz, who was game-show host Tom Kennedy’s brother.

Gallopin Gals

“Let’s not put all our eggs in one basket,” Joe Barbera remembers Fred Quimby telling him after the first Tom and Jerry cartoon, “Puss Gets the Boot,” was made in 1940. So Joe and Bill Hanna toiled away on some decidedly lesser offerings until, as legend has it, Interstate Theatre booker Besa Short asked the mucky-mucks at MGM when her theatres were going to get more cat and mouse cartoons. That’s when the mucky-mucks told Quimby to tell Joe and Bill to stick to the cat and mouse.

Four non Tom-and-Jerrys were made by Hanna and Barbera in 1940-41; the first was credited to Rudy Ising. The second was “Gallopin’ Gals,” featuring female horses with huge mouths making catty comments while a derelict mare beats them all to win the big race.

There are no animator credits, so I can’t tell who use who drew these. One horse has a shiny nose; the other has mascara running.



The clutzy, mute derelict, Maggie, has hay-fever, the narrator tells us. Multiple heads after a sneeze.



The cartoon’s an interesting footnote in the careers of Hanna and Barbera, but I can’t see the characters as more than one-shots.

Sara Berner gets to try out a few impressions and her Brooklyn accent playing some of the horses. You can hear Elvia Allman as well. A few of the horses, including a blonde, are voiced by Blanche Stewart, who was on “The Bob Hope Show” at the time where she and Allman played Brenda and Cobina; characters who sounded like they had horse-faces, too. I can’t place the narrator, but he sounds familiar.

With Fiery Blasts Our Roaring Rockets Rise

Since it’s Canada Day today, let us pay a humble tribute to the glorious pinnacle of exported Canadian entertainment, a legendary television show that shines brighter than even the brilliant SCTV.



Yes, Rocket Robin Hood, “The Trouble With Tracy” of Canadian animation. Appropriate it is that a show about outer space should be animated and voiced in the Centre of the Universe™, Toronto.

Perhaps we should avoid the temptation to call this an “animated cartoon” because, isn’t it far greater than an animated series like, say, “The Robotic Harlem Globetrotters” (or whatever it was called)? Well, that and it isn’t very animated. Oh, it is in the opening. In fact, we get to see the same animation of Robin heroically raising his sinewy arms twice. But some of the time drawings of characters simply remain rigid frame-after-frame while only the lips move. Unless it’s a medium-long shot where nothing is animated while the soundtrack crackles with dialogue. Hey, non-lip movement worked for the Fleischers, didn’t it? Shamus Culhane worked there. Obviously the close-mouthed mumblings of Popeye were an inspiration when the demure Mr. Culhane produced this programme. And Robin’s better than Popeye because he doesn’t need a crutch like spinach.

Gape with awe at some of the background drawings from the show opening.



How great is this show? There’s one episode where Little John suddenly has a different voice about half-way through the cartoon. It’s like the first actor got drunk at lunch and was so out of it, someone else had to do his lines when the session picked up in the afternoon. (To be serious, the show featured the voices of Bernard Cowan, Paul Kligman and under-used Carl Banas, so it wasn’t all bad). And, unlike Buck Rogers, who we know is in the 25th Century, Robin and his posse are in “the fabulous years to come,” as if the writers couldn’t make up their minds when to set the show.

With all the reboots on TV and in theatres these days why, oh, why, hasn’t an artistic soul come forward to freshen this series for modern times, turning the Merry Men of N.O.T.T. into futuristic, lute-playing hip-hoppers starring Lil RR Hoody? Isn’t it time? Shame on Shamus that he’s not around any more to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money to update one of his masterpieces. But perhaps you, dear reader, can assemble a band of brothers, marching together, heads held high in all kinds of weather, to bring back Canada’s gift to the world— Front Page Challenge Rocket Robin Hood—and return him to a rightful position of prominence and esteem on television once again.

Newcomer Jack Benny

Jack Benny wasn’t always Jack Benny. He was born Benny Kubelsky and it’s part of the Benny lore that he went through several names in vaudeville before changing his billing from Ben. K. Benny to Jack Benny. In his autobiographical notes contained in a book written by his daughter Joan, he doesn’t explain the reason for the final change, though it’s generally conceded it was because of legal rumblings from orchestra leader Ben Bernie; the two toured on the same circuit at the time. And there are several explanations about how the name “Jack Benny” was picked; Jack himself stated in the posthumous book it was comedian Benny Rubin’s idea after hearing Jack and his ex-Navy buddies call each other “Jack” at a restaurant in St. Louis.

Benny never specified in his autobiographical notes when he made the name switch, but wrote that his act had changed by 1921 and he only used his violin to play himself off the stage at the end. He spent most of the first half of 1920 as Ben K. Benny in a show on the Orpheum circuit and headlined much of the time by the Four Marx Brothers. The “Show Biz Bible,” Variety reported on September 10, 1920, he was Ben K. at the State-Lake in Chicago starting the week of the 13th. In the edition the following week, the trade paper revealed that Jack Benny was at the Majestic in Milwaukee (another Orpheum theatre) starting on the 20th.

Benny travelled east. He played at the Prospect Theatre in Brooklyn on the F.F. Proctor Time the week of January 10th, and the following week was on the first half of the bill at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York City; the headliner was Eddie Foy and Family. He was reviewed under the “Newcomers” column in Variety of Friday, January 21, 1921 by none other than founder Sime Silverman. Evidently Silverman didn’t realise Benny had played the Orpheum circuit as it was hardly small time (the term “time,” as you can see, originated in vaudeville). Here’s what Silverman had to say:

JACK BENNY. Monologist.
14 Mins.; One.
5th Ave.
Jack Benny has a violin and talk. Mainly talk. He handles himself as though having played small time, though his talk material is new. When Benny said he had stopped smoking as smoking: is now too effeminate, he waited for the expected laugh which was not as hearty as he looked for, so he repeated the gag. Later when nearing the finish and the right exit, he pointed to his name on the card, while playing the violin, and saying, "Jack Benny. That's me. They couldn't get my right name on it."
His talk is along the lines of his girl, who lives in Philadelphia, with an idle brother and a father, who died, Benny said, the same evening he was to take his girl to the theatre. On account of the death of his girl's father, he added, they were late for the performance. The 5th Ave. audience thought that was funnier than the smoking gag, which about sums up the 5th Ave.
In outline of turn, Benny has been a student of Ben Bernie, it seems. He talks much like Bernie, but has none of Bernie's gags. His violin playing is negligible for results. He holds the instrument in the regular way, under the neck, whereas Bernie holds it carelessly, often against his body, which Green of Green and Myra, on the same bill, must have intently observed, as he played his violin along that style. It wasn't vaudevilly to have two violinists on the same bill and have both of them recall Bernie, although Bernie may not mind it. It certainly did not help Benny. But Benny seems able to helf [sic] himself. He has gags, presence and assurance. His only worry just now may be how he is going to follow Bernie if he can make the big time. The answer seems to be for Benny to throw away his violin while Bernie is using one, and try another method of working in his talk, if he doesn't care to become a monologist, outright.
The Delmar time can handle Benny, also the Orpheum Circuit, and the other bookings in between and below, but while Benny looks good enough to make all the time, he can't make the best as at present framed up. Sime.

“One” means he was a solo act, standing in front of the curtain.

Jack took out an ad in the New York Dramatic World of February 26, 1921, announcing he was represented by Thos. J. Pitzpatrick. His career was on its way again, travelling across the U.S. and western Canada. And I hear they loved him in St. Joe.

Who Was the Real Betty Boop?

Quick, name the voice of Betty Boop. Okay, now name all the voices of Betty Boop.

The first question’s probably a breeze to any fan of old cartoons; I suspect Mae Questel came to mind. The last one may be a little trickier. During the lawsuit filed against the Fleischer and Paramount studios by Helen “boop-oop-a-oop” Kane, Max Fleischer testified that he had used five actresses to play Betty on the screen. Questel was only one of them. The other four were Little Ann Little, Margie Hines, Bonnie Poe and Harriet Lee. The trial publicity prompted the first four to get together on stage in New York City (and, appropriately, at the Paramount Theatre) where they all appeared as Betty Boop in a show starting May 14, 1934.

Lee seems to have been an unusual choice. For one thing, she was a contralto. Lee appeared on radio in New York in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s and then disappeared. Jimmy Fidler tracked her down and revealed in a 1938 column she was in Hollywood employed as Dorothy Lamour’s voice coach. Poe headed west for a time, too. The New York Sun of July 22, 1933 stated she had been the on-screen voice of Betty “for the last four months” and had been appearing in the role on a radio show. By April 1934, she was a nightclub hostess in Los Angeles and suing George Raft for $25,000 for breach of promise on top of that. Poe seems to have faded into the filmland sunset soon after. Hines, as you may know, married and then divorced Jack Mercer, the eventual voice of Popeye.

But as far as Little Ann Little was concerned, she was Betty Boop. And God help you if you said the word “Questel” to her. Well, God wouldn’t help you because He was on Ann’s side, as you shall read.

The internet is chock-full of misinformation about her, thanks to someone’s incorrect guesswork and her own obit. No, she was not born in 1910. No, she was not born “Ann Rothschild.” Her claim she was a native New Yorker appears to have been stretching the truth, like a few other things in her interviews.

The one thing Ann Little never explained—nor did anyone else on the record—is why she was replaced with Questel as the voice of Betty Boop in the cartoons. Fleischer testified at the Kane trial (August 20, 1934) that Paramount hired the actresses, not he. Little treats it like it never happened. She gave a made-up excuse about why Betty stopped appearing in cartoons and leaves the impression she was there when it happened. She seems to have identified far too much with the character, telling the St. Petersburg Evening Independent in 1950 that she preferred to be called “Betty” instead of her real name, and the paper dutifully reports in other stories about “Betty Boop” and her students.

Florida death records show that Annabelle L. Rothschild was born March 1, 1902. They don’t reveal what her birth name was or where she was born. Evidently it was not in the United States. A naturalisation petition was granted to her on August 12, 1943. She married a tax assessor named Louis Herbert Werner. He was 22 years her senior; in fact, he married his first wife before Ann was even born. They tied the knot between 1940 and 1942; Werner’s World War Two draft card from 1942 lists a Brooklyn address that was crossed out and substituted with a Florida address in 1943. Ann apparently wintered in Florida for a time; an Evening Independent story from February 1937 reveals someone performing locally “who was billed as the ‘original voice of Betty Boop’.” Little isn’t mentioned but it’s a safe assumption it’s her.

The pair now in living with other snowbirds in St. Petersburg, Little found work as a make-up and hair instructor at a local charm school. Werner died on January 8, 1948 (his obit said he had arrived in the city in 1941) and the following month, the newspaper mentions Ann had changed jobs and was teaching dance at a studio. Between 1948 and 1950 (I can’t find the exact date now), the paper reveals she had opened her own studio and named it after Betty Boop. Little married Joseph M. Rothschild in July 1960; he died in July 1969 and she remained a widow until her death on October 22, 1981.

Here are several newspaper stories where Little talks about her life and her career in cartoons. This one appeared in the Evening Independent on October 2, 1948. There are odd claims galore in the story but the oddest is the assertion that Max Fleischer stopped making Betty Boop cartoons because he was sick. He never was sick. By extention, Little implies she was around until Betty’s dying days and that certainly wasn’t the case.

St. Petersburg Postscript To Hollywood Story
Betty Boop Studying For the Ministry
By C. WINN UPCHURCH
Max Fleischer and Paramount Studios had the cartoon heroine Betty Boop on the screen for eight years but this was never in the script. Betty Boop is studying to be a minister.
Honest-to-pat. The little lady is devoting her life to religion.
By Betty Boop we mean, of course, Ann Little Werner, who did the animations for that cute little movie cartoon trick with the squeaky voice and the Esquire figure.
Ann, who resides at 1850 Fifth avenue north and is an instructor at the Pauline Buhner school of dance, has already completed six month of Bible study. Her goal is to be an ordained minister and preach the Gospel from a pulpit
. “I used to bring joy to the outer man and now I want to be bring joy to the inner man,” she says.
Ann started in show business in 1925 as a member of the pony chorus with the Greenwich Village Follies in her native New York city. She was also an RKO discovery and at one time had her own program over the NBC network as Singer Little Ann Little. But it was as the voice of Betty Boop that Ann became a star.
“I heard that Paramount was holding tryouts for a tiny girl with a squeaky voice for the Betty Boop role and I tried for the job and got it,” Ann recounts.
“From 1932 until 1940 we made 18 cartoons a year. Sixteen thousand drawings were made to complete one seven-minute reel. After the film was completed it was my job to fill in the dialogue with songs and chatter on the sound track. In addition I made personal appearance tours as Betty. I used to get loads of fan mail, especially from children and men. The kiddies always believed that I actually went back into the ink well after the reel had been shown.”
Present day youngsters never had the pleasure of knowing Betty Boop on the screen but in her hey-day she was as popular, if not more so, than Mickey Mouse. She was forever in trouble but always managed to dive back into the inkwell before Koko the Clown or the giant could snatch her away.
As she ran fleeing from the huge hand of the giant her tiny scream had the audience in a tizzy until good triumphed over evil.
In the 30’s Helen Kane, the singer, sued Paramount for one-quarter million dollars claiming that the boob-boop-a-doop idea was hers. The case went to the New York supreme court and the judge ruled in favor of Fleischer. Kane appealed and again lost the case. Betty Boop would still be bringing joy to the hearts of movie-goers if Fleischer had not become ill and retired from movie-making. Betty Boop was always close to his heart and he would never sell the rights to any other studio, Anne says.
Ann moved to St. Petersburg five years ago with her late husband who was a retired employe of Consolidated Edison. He died six months ago. During the war Ann entertained the patients at government hospitals and did other volunteer war work.
She is very tiny, being only four feet-ten inches and weighs 100 pounds, only five pounds more than she did when she starred in the 30s as Betty Boop.
And she still retains that boob-boop-a-doop squeaky voice that makes you want to protect her from that brute, Koko the Clown.

Koko a “brute”? I must have missed that cartoon.

Ann’s first husband had belonged to the Unity Church.

Another newspaper caught up with her in 1971. The Associated Press picked up the story and it appeared in newspapers beginning June 22nd that year.

Cartoon voice now minister
By STEVE RUEDIGER
Tampa Tribune Staff Writer
FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP)- Although Ann Rothschild quit being the voice of a famous animated cartoon character to go into the ministry more than 25 years ago, she's still perfect at doing the high, childish voice most people quickly recognize as "Betty Boop."
Mrs. Rothschild did the "Betty Boop" voice and made personal appearances as Betty Boop from 1933 to 1945. Before that, she was in vaudeville as "Miss Little Ann Little."
Now that 4-foor-1l-inch tall Mrs. Rothschild lives in a condominium development, and loves it, "because the people are my age, and they knew me and want me to sing at all the parties."
She said as "Betty Boop" she made about 18 cartoons a year and traveled throughout the country making personal appearances, in which she tap-danced, sang and did comedy sketches.
Mrs. Rothschild has a collection of publicity photographs from her "Betty Boop" days.
She admitted "Betty Boop" was the only cartoon voice she could do because, although she tried to change her voice, it was so distinctive, producers told her it would have been recognized.
Mrs. Rothschild left show business in 1946 to study for the ministry and later was ordained a Christian Unity minister.
She said she quit the entertainment field also because her husband retired and they moved to Florida.
But in 1948 her first husband died. She decided to set up the "Betty Boop School of Dancing" in St. Petersburg to teach dancing, singing and elocution.
Her most famous pupil was actress Carroll Baker, whom she taught for three years. Then, in 1951, she closed her school and came to Fort Myers to set up a Christian Unity Church.
She maintains show business and the ministry are the same thing. "In show business you try to lift people up so they can forget their problems, and it's the same in religion. You try to lift their minds off their problems and put it on God."

But Little seems to have a problem separating herself from a cartoon character. She complained in a story Fort Myers News Press about Mae Questel. She forgot—conveniently or otherwise—that she and Questel had appeared on stage together after the Kane trial was over (she had testified she was 24 which was a barefaced lie). In fact, she even seems to have deluded herself into believing the trial was about her, when it was about a cartoon character. All she had to do was easily explain to the reporter that Questel was one of the other people who voiced the character but she just can’t seem to bring herself to admit any one else was Betty Boop. And just because she sang boop-oop-a-doop on stage in the mid-‘20s doesn’t make her Betty Boop. A court of law twice told that to Helen Kane.

Maureen Bashaw was a long-time reporter and a champion for people with autism but she had problems spelling Max Fleischer’s name, unless the editor screwed it up. Her story was syndicated and this version appeared in print October 6, 1975.

Identity crisis for star
By MAUREEN BASHAW
Gannett News Service
FORT MYERS, Fla.—The boop-boop-a-doop gal is mad.
There she was, this 77-pound, 58-inch, orange-haired, blue-eyed ex-cartoon and vaudeville queen, sitting in her apartment here a few weeks ago crying and laughing with the soap opera games on television, when the telephone rang and a friend told her he’d heard a lady on the tube the night before claiming to be the “original Betty Boop”.
Small balls of fire started to burn in Ann Rothschild’s eyes and heart, and although she says she’s “absolutely retired from show business,” she decided to speak out.
“I’m upset. I’m tired of hearing about these ORIGINAL Betty Boops and people around here thinking I’m a fraud. I’m the original Betty Boop. I began doing the boop-boop-a-doop songs when I was on the road with the vaudeville shows (back in the 1920s.)
“Then when Max Fliescher of Paramount Studios (in New York) was looking for someone for his new Betty Boop cartoon character (in 1932), I went to the auditions and he chose me.
“There were hundreds of girls there and most of them could sing better than I could. But I don’t know. I suppose I had what he wanted. I was very tiny and very pretty, you know, and I had this high-pitched voice.
“Anyway, Mr. Fliescher always said I was the original Betty Boop. He even won a court case over me once.
“Of course, there were other boop-boop-a-doop girls (back in the late 1920s and early 1930s). Helen Kane (she died several years ago of cancer) was one of them.
When Mr. Fliescher told her she couldn’t use the name Betty Boop in her acts, she tried to sue him for a quarter of a million dollars but she lost the case.
“Yes, that was back in 1934. You can look up the case in the New York Supreme Court records.
“Yet, there are still people who think Helen Kane was the original Betty. Just a few weeks ago, on ‘Musical Chairs’ (a CBS program), someone asked a lady on the panel who the original Betty Boop was and the lady said ‘Helen Hayes,’ and she won the prize money.
“Then my friend called me ... (in late August) to tell me he’d heard this Mae Questell on television — she’s a little fat woman I met in Mr. Fliescher’s office a few times — saying she was the original Betty Boop on the Tom Snyder show (NBC).
“I’m upset. Some people around here are beginning to think I’m a fraud. They go around wisp, wisp, wisping about me. It bothers me.”
Mrs. Rothschild came to Fort Myers in 1951 from St. Petersburg, where she operated her own Betty Boop studio for five years.
She spent 20 years in show business and another 20 studying and preaching the teachings of the Unity faith.
Her show business career started in the early 1920s when she was "the baby" of the Greenwich Village Follies.
She later teamed up with another Follies performer and played in the vaudeville houses in and around New York City a number of years.
Then, of course, came the Betty Boop stint.
The name Betty Boop became a household word from 1933 to 1945 when Betty Boop cartoons and Betty Boop dolls were the rage. Mrs. Rothschild also starred in movies from Paramount during the 1930s.
But, in 1945, she gave it all up to run her studio in St. Petersburg. Among her students was Carroll Baker who has appeared in a number of Hollywood productions.
She then enrolled in the Unity Village school in Kansas City, Mo., and kept up correspondence courses. In 1951, she was sent to Fort Myers for on-the-job training. By 1954, she was an ordained minister and at one time hosted a weekly radio program on the Unity faith.

So which cartoons did Ann Little appear in? I’m not going to even try to guess. If you listen to the sound tracks you can tell Betty’s voice isn’t by the same person in all of them. It’s a shame the studio records were destroyed years ago (Richard Fleischer’s book outlines their shocking fate). Mae Questel was certainly at Fleischer’s by 1932 as that’s what one contemporary newspaper story I’ve found says. But, regardless, the cartoons were a lot of fun for a while. Flowers and chairs coming to life. Talking animals that pop up and disappear. Warped little gags out of nowhere. Some great songs by Sammy Lerner. All of it made the Fleischer cartoons, far and away, the best that came out of New York. And some say anywhere.

All Toes Accounted For

Billy Boy eats everything. Including the leather of the shoe of Farmer Wolf.



Fortunately, Billy didn’t chew off any of the foot. The wolf counts his toes. “2, 4, 6, 8, 10. They’re all there.” And he wiggles them for good measure.



Tex Avery’s crew in this 1954 release were Ray Patterson, Grant Simmons, Mike Lah, Bob Bentley and Walt Clinton, with layouts by Ed Benedict. Avery was gone from the studio for almost a year by the time this cartoon appeared in theatres. Patterson and Simmons opened Grantray-Lawrence that year. Clinton was one of their animators.

Snafu's Sally Lou

Only in animated cartoons could a putz like Private Snafu attract a woman like this.



There are bare breasts in women’s pictures in a background drawing in “Censored” (1944) but director Frank Tashlin doesn’t show any in the animation. No, they weren’t censored; “Censored” in this cartoon refers to mail from servicemen being sent home. Besides, Tashlin shows lots of leg, which I’m quite sure he was happy with.

Tashlin’s unit had Izzy Ellis and Cal Dalton at the time. Thad Komorowski reminds me Artie Davis was also in it and had arrived from Columbia before Tashlin.

Inanities of Old Radio

Some people love reality TV. Some people love daytime talk. Others wonder why anyone would waste their time with it.

Radio of the 1940s was no different. I find soap operas cheesy, many of the sitcoms eye-rollingly contrived and a few dramatic shows leaning on the crutch of ham-acting stereotypes. But put on Jack Benny or Jimmy Durante or a musical show with a great band, and I’ll tune in.

New York Herald-Tribune syndicate radio writer John Crosby wasn’t one to cut a lot of slack to radio. He praised the good and ridiculed the bad as he saw it. I’m going to pass on two of his columns written within two weeks of each other in 1948. The first is from November 3rd and spotlights a potpourri of radio tidbits he almost greets with incredulity. Interestingly, someone in 1948 thought of the idea of those annoying TV bugs that plaster every channel today. He rightfully is aghast. The second column is from October 25th where he facetiously bemoans the deterioration of the radio jingle. I must admit I only remember the Pepsi jingle co-written by announcer Alan Kent. How could anyone hate it? By the way, Jack Bleeck’s saloon was right next to the Herald-Tribune. Imagine putting a bar next to a newspaper office.

Radio In Review
By JOHN CROSBY
Small Trends
TODAY is our day for small trends, the smaller the better for little happenings in radio of minute consequence and virtually no significance.
A man gets tired of handing down sweeping judgments every day; every man should have a day of rest devoted exclusively to any minutiae he happens to have lying around. I have a whole bag-ful at my elbow. Here are just a few.
The announcer on “We, the People” last week summed up the apathy characteristic of this election with magnificent though unconscious irony in a routine announcement which went: “Next Tuesday, election night, ‘We, the People’ will not be heard.”
A FEW WEEKS AGO in the soap opera “When a Girl Marries”, the tangle of misunderstanding which characterizes that as well as all other soap operas suddenly cleared.
Nobody was at cross purposes with anyone else. No one was frustrated about anything. No one was struck with hysterical blindness or, more importantly, with even the fear of approaching blindness. For one day, every blessed soul on “When a Girl Marries” was blissfully happy. As if that wasn’t enough to shake my faith in the established order of things, there was the case on “Suspense” of Ray Milland playing the part of one of those tough, extraordinarily competent detectives who is tracking down a murderer.
HE THOUGHT he had his man, a very suspicious character, but the guy wouldn't answer questions.
In a moment of anger, the cop slugged the murder suspect, who instantly dropped dead.
The rest of the story was devoted to Milland’s efforts to beat a murder rap himself. I can’t think what drove the writer of that program to shatter an ancient tradition in such an uncouth manner, to make a cop behave in a way that no cop has ever behaved on the radio. Iconoclasm? Desperation? Or simply the belief that radio hasn’t long to live anyway and we might just as well start breaking up the joint right now?
ON “LADIES BE SEATED” the other day, a woman was presented with a question which would tax the intellect of a 3-week-old child. What state, asked Tom Moore, the emcee, is distinguished by orange groves, mineral deposits and gold?
“Illinois,” said the lady.
Mr. Moore sighed and threw in a few more clues. The state he had in mind, said Moore, was known for its cinema and sunshine; the capital was Sacramento and the theme song was, in garbled version, “Da da da da, here I come.”
In the end Moore had to tell her the right answer was California.
“I’m from Florida,” the lady informed him grimly, “and I don't want to publicize that state on the radio.”
ONE OF THE MORE horrifying new ideas, recently put forth by the magazine “Tele Tech”, is that of identifying both sponsor and station continuously throughout a television program with a little sign on the lower left hand corner of the television screen.
Like this:
Camels.
WNBT.
“As suggested for TV, the plan would answer repeated inquiries from video audiences: ‘What station is this’ and ‘Who is the sponsor.’” Anyone around here been asking those questions?

Radio In Review
By JOHN CROSBY
The Compulsive Drinker
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in Bleeck’s saloon the other night, drinking more than was good for them and singing old folk songs and some of the more recent ones. About midnight, the quartet, a seedy but determined bunch of singers, began, as is their custom at that hour, that old English chantey which Roes:
“It's delicious yum yum yum.
“It's delightful. Order some.
“Now demand it. What's the name?
“Piel’s light beer of Broadway fame.”
After they finished, Fogarty, the red-headed bass of this outfit, said mournfully: “They don't write songs like in the good old days.” It's a complaint familiar to most of the drinkers there, especially after midnight.
“Now,” he continued pugnaciously, “you take a grand old number like ‘Pepsi-Cola Hits the Spot.’ Nobody is writing songs like that any more.” He began singing a snatch:
“Nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel.”
“They took that out,” Roberts, the tenor, reminded him. “It isn’t a nickel any more. It’s six cents.”
“Inflation,” said Fogarty sadly, “It’s even ruining the old songs. And the new songs you can’t sing at all. Now you take a song like this song I heard yesterday.” He sang in his watery bass:
“When the values go up, up, up
“And the prices come down, down, down.
“Robert Hall this season
“Will tell you the reason.
“Low overhead. Low overhead.”
He broke off in disgust. “What sort of song is that, I ask you? ‘Low overhead. Low overhead.’ Sir William Gilbert would turn over in his grave. Man can’t open his mouth on these new lyrics.”
Roberts, a dreamy and timid little drunk, spoke up. “There’s another one going the rounds that’s even harder.” He sang it.
“Don’t be afraid to look at your hands
“When you get through scouring pots and pans.
“Use Ajax, new miracle cleanser
“With exclusive foaming action.”
Every one agreed that last line foamed in the wrong places. I watched Roberts closely after that one because he is a strange little guy, what the psychiatrists call a compulsive drinker. In fact, he suffers from a lot of funny compulsions, a pushover for an advertising man. Sure enough, he started looking at his hands guiltily. He probably never scoured a pot or pan in his life but the thought had been put in his mind that he was afraid to look at his hands. I bet anything he scurried around to the grocery store the next day and bought some of that miracle cleanser.
Every one of those songs that demanded you do something, Roberts went and did it, simply because he didn’t believe in taking any chances. “Don’t be half safe. Don’t be half safe. Don’t be half safe,” was his philosophy, sung to the tune of “The Volga Boatman.”
I feel sorry for this little guy because I think singing commercials have wrecked his life. I remember the night we were all sitting around the back room at Bleeck’s, singing. Roberts had this girl with him and Roberts, for no special reason, began singing—all by himself for no one else knew the words—that splendid old ballad
“You can say yes to romance.
“Be dainty and don’t take a chance.
“Soft as a lover’s caress
“Vote for happiness.”
Well, sir, this girl followed instructions to the letter; the following week she said yes to romance, married poor Roberts and has made his life miserable ever since. There’s only one of these songs that ever did Roberts any good. That's the one that goes:
“Today is Tuesday. Today is Tuesday.
“Time for Adams, candy coated gum.”
Up until the time that one got on the air, Roberts used to wander around all day Tuesday thinking in his confused way that it was Thursday, Now he's hep to the day of the week but come to think of it. I don’t know what good that does him either.
Just then the subject of these speculations spoke up: “I got to get home. Just one more, fellows.”
And he began and we all joined in on that rollicking little number:
“Kasco! Kasco! Dogs all love it so.
“What a meaty treat is Kasco.
“K-A-S-C-O.
“Oh where, oh where has my little dog gone?
“He’s heading for the kitchen and his
“K-A-S-C-O.”

The Jungle of Nairobi

Say something nice about a Gene Deitch Tom and Jerry cartoon? Well, how about this background which opens the 1962 cartoon “Sorry Safari”? Great design and colour. This is from frame-grabs pasted together from a DVD pan so the colours don’t quite match.



It’s on the screen for 41 seconds before an airplane lands. Unfortunately, the background artist remains anonymous.

Don't Lose Your Head

Why Oswald the Rabbit has a mechanical horse isn’t really quite clear in “Ozzie of the Mounted” (1928)—they seem to litter various late ‘20s cartoon series—but an errant spring from inside the animal cuts his head off.



Oswald dances around before the head comes down from the sky. The force of it sinks it into his body.



The head pops back up out of the body and bounces up and down on the top of the body because Oswald presses it into place on his head.



Maybe the most interesting thing about the scene is Oswald struggles to push the spring back into the horse. The spring keeps wanting to bounce up and there are little movements up and down. You feel the pressure Oswald is using. Pretty elaborate for a silent cartoon.

This is a Walt Disney Oswald so Walt is the only one credited, even though he didn’t draw anything. Devon Baxter credits this scene to Ham Hamilton.