A Quick Trip to the Stork Club

The Stork Club was one of New York City’s most famous night spots, and it makes an appearance in “A Hare Grows in Manhattan,” the great Bugs Bunny biographical cartoon directed by Friz Freleng.



Oddly, either layout man Hawley Pratt or whoever drew the final storyboard that Pratt worked from didn’t use the correct address of the real club on the awning. The actual Stork Club was at 3 East 53rd Street. Here’s a great photo of the front entrance.



The club’s appearance in the cartoon is quick. A thug bulldog chases Bugs through it. Naturally, since it is the Stork Club, it’s populated with storks.



The club is no more. On the site are a few trees cut into a cement slab with cement bowls of greenery, known as Paley Park. If you want to learn about the fascinating history of the club, read about it at this web site.

For the Tired Businessman

There’s something for everyone in Tex Avery’s “House of Tomorrow” (1949), including the mother-in-law. Avery and his story guys use the mother-in-law as a topper in some comparison gags, except one dealing with the TV set of tomorrow.



Narrator Frank Graham informs us it “features a screen for each member of the family.”



For the housewife. Scott Bradley plays “Shortenin’ Bread” in the background.



For the kiddies. Avery liked making fun of the ubiquity of westerns on TV and did it in a few other cartoons.



And for the tired businessman. The camera slowly pans up.

In case you’re wondering about the identity of the young lady, let us read Daily Variety from September 21, 1948:

Metro Cartoons Mixing Action and Animation
Metro is getting into the field of combination live action and animation cartoons. First two cartoons in the combined medium will he "Senor Droopy," with Lina Romay and "House of Tomorrow," with Joy Lansing. Tex Avery will direct both shorts for producer Fred Quimby.

I remember her from “The Beverly Hillbillies,” though I don’t think she appeared in very many episodes. She was only 44 when she died of cancer in 1972.

Benny's Life of Leisure

There seems to have been a shift in entertainment writing in newspapers as the calendar changed decades into the 1960s. For years, the show biz world in print was dominated by gossip columnists—Hedda, Louella, Winchell, Fidler and so on—who would erupt with a spurt of brief items on a bunch of celebrities and then do it all over again the next day, hopefully landing a scoop in the process. But their status and influenced finally waned, and newspapers seemed to start favouring longer profiles, one star per column.

True or not, Jack Benny got an awful lot of attention in syndicated and wire service columns through the ‘60s until his death in 1974. Some of the feature stories ran a couple of pages in weekend newspapers. A chap named Lloyd Shearer did two on Jack in less than a year.

Here’s one from United Press International that appeared in newspapers beginning March 29, 1964. While Benny was constantly busy, either with television or concert appearances, he still managed to have relaxing life. Who wants to keep their nose to the grindstone when they’re 39?

What Kind of a Guy Is Jack Benny?
By VERNON SCOTT
UP-International Writer
Hollywood — For a millionaire celebrity, Jack Benny leads a simple, uncomplicated life in luxurious surroundings. If that sounds paradoxical, consider the fact that the blue-eyed 70-year-old comedian could live the life of an Oriental potentate with yachts, New York town houses, castles on the Rhine, strings of race horses, strings of dancing girls and a lifetime pass to the jet set.
Instead Jack lives in a comfortable mansion on the most prestigious street in Beverly Hills, a home he built 27 years ago.
As mansions go, the Benny home is modest, it has four bedrooms, upstairs, a library, living room, play room, kitchen, dining room, and servants' quarters. The exterior presents a neat, manicured appearance to the world. It reflects its owner's personality.
Jack Benny is not a funny man unless he is being paid for it. At home, backstage, at his club or at a party Jack is a listener, a good audience for other comedians. He doesn't try to get laughs himself.
• • •
NEITHER IS he impaled by the frenzy and urgency of a weekly television series that besets other comedians. He has his schedule down pat. His work day begins at 7 a. m. with a leisurely breakfast.
He reports to his office at 10 a. m. four days a week, driving there in his Rolls-Royce in five minutes, or via a brisk, half-hour walk. Readings "and rehearsals require only two hours each of the first two days. The other two days' work are polished off in a morning.
"We don't work very much," Jack admits. "It keeps a certain spontaneity going on the show."
Benny's offices are located on the fringe of the Beverly Hills business district adjacent to the Friars Club; a show business institution.
There, in deep leather chairs or around a card table, the comedian frequently has lunch with friends or his writers.
Other times he will nip off to Hillcrest Country Club for lunch and a round of golf. He's horrendous at the game, but plods around with a 20 handicap. Golf and gin rummy are his major moans of relaxation.
• • •

HIS PASSIONATE preoccupation is playing the violin.
"I practice an hour or two every day, sometimes longer," says Benny. "It's the pleasantest way I know of spending my time."
He is particularly proud of his Stradivarius, a delicate instrument he bought six years ago. He values it at $40,000.
Benny and his wife, Mary, live alone in the big house with a butler and cook. A gardener tends the lawns, flowers and shrubs. Jack occasionally takes a dip in the, pool in the summer months, and once in a while has an over-the-back-yard-fence chat with his next-door neighbor, Lucille Ball.
• • •
SOCIALLY, the Bennys entertain two or three times a month. Their close friends are George Burns and Gracie Allen, Danny Kaye, Groucho Marx, Mervyn LeRoy and Billy Wilder.
They dine out infrequently, but often attend dinner parties at the home of friends. When they do visit a restaurant, Jack favors Cantonese food at the exotic Traders restaurant, a mile or so from his house. He watches his diet and, at 70, is in near perfect health.
Most evenings Jack reads the newspapers and watches television. His taste runs to dramatic shows, not comedies.
Once a week his grandchildren, Michael, 8 1/2, and Maria, 6 1/2, spend the night. It is Mary's favorite time of the week. The youngsters live with their mother, Joan, who was adopted by the Bennys in infancy. She lives a few blocks from her , parents with her husband, movie executive Robert Blumoffe.
• • •
EARLIER this year Benny was voted one of Hollywood's best-dressed men by an organization he can't quite remember. It pleased him.
Jack leans to conservative business suits in grays and blues. They are all tailored for him. But at his office he usually can be found in open sports shirts and slacks.
His practice sessions with the violin generally take place in his bedroom, a spacious boudoir that includes a desk and shelves of books, along with leather-bound copies of his scripts down through the years.
Benny gives generously to charity and is the antithesis of the miserly, egocentric character he plays on his show. He appears to be almost without ego, unruffled by praise or criticism. Neither is he sensitive about his age.
He enjoys his violin concerts more than he does his television show. And peculiarly, he seems to be unaware that he is one of the great comedy stars of his era; a man who has spent more years on radio and television entertaining Americans than any other performer of his time.
He moves his network show from CBS to NBC next season. And because Benny is Benny, televiewers will make the move right along with him.

Commercials by Pencil

We’ve asked this before on the blog, but have you been checking out Mike Kazaleh’s series of posts over at Cartoon Research on animated commercials of the 1950s? Chances are if your favourite animator vanished from the credits of theatrical shorts for a period of time, he ended up working for one of the many commercial or industrial studios around then. Tex Avery, Rod Scribner, Ed Love, George Nicholas, Emery Hawkins, the list is a pretty long one.

The Golden Age of Television was the Golden Age of the Cartoon Commercial. How can you not like those old animated spots? The designs were varied and creative. They were funny. And cartoons sold everything. Eventually, someone must have listened to the tired old mantra that cartoons are only for kids because by the ‘60s, most of the animated commercials were for cereal and other stuff aimed at children (the great Alka Seltzer stomach spot being a notable exception).

There have never been very many articles in the popular press about commercials of any kind (excepting the overhyped Super Bowl ads, I suppose), but here’s one from the Pasadena Star News of Saturday, March 16, 1957. You’ll notice a few names are incorrectly spelled.

INSIDE TV
By EVE STARR
STARR REPORT: A new group of television stars has emerged from the ever fertile and creative minds of artists responsible for those animated advertising cartoons you see on television all hours of the day and night. The trade knows them as the “pencil point stars.” A 60-second animated film costs about $15,000 ($250 a second) and takes eight weeks to complete. Does that sound expensive? Well, it is! But it is just what a sponsor might pay if he approached Don Quinn, president of Ad Staff, Inc.; Adrian Woolery, owner of Playhouse Pictures; Walt Disney Productions; or U.P.A.— just a few of the many specifically designing clever television cartoon commercials to capture your attention, imagination and to pull out your purse strings!
A shorter animated commercial may be acquired for as low as $4,000 and require only four weeks to complete, having less animation, complexity of color, dialogue and music.
“Gone is the day of a thrush-throated announcer excitedly telling you to rush to your neighborhood store and buy the last carload of his sponsor’s product. Sponsors today merely suggest the advantages of their products against a background of soothing or novelty music, trick voices and animated characters. It seems Mr. and Mrs. Public part with their money easier if they can laugh while doing it, and this accounts for the increase cartoon advertising,” says Adrian Woolery.
A staff of more than people is needed to process the commercial film. Every presentation has a writer, director and “pencil point star”—the star being the figment of the artist’s imagination. The picture is about to roll. The artists are alerted! Find a star—one with warmth, a strong personality, sense of humor and above all, saleability! And from the point of a pencil a star is born! When the sponsor approves the “pencil point star,” another kind of talent hunt is launched to find a voice for the star. A long list is screened of Hollywood’s finest cartoon voices headed by Stan Freeberg, Jim Backus, Eddie Mayehoff, Mel Blanc, June Foray and Dawes Butler. When a decision is made the “voices” meet in a recording studio to pre-record the dialogue.
The “star” now goes to wardrobe and makeup departments; that is, he is permanently transferred to a celluloid slide in ink, and what has been a drab black and white drawing is brought to life by color. He is given flashing blue eyes, gray dimples, rosy cheeks, a shock of long blonde hair—and is then worthy of the title “star.” Meanwhile, in another building the scenic artists are preparing the “sets,” or the painted backgrounds against which the animated characters will appear.
“Camera! Lights! Action!” is the next call for this miniature production. When the filming is completed it is processed, edited and previewed for a select audience of the firm’s staff. If there are retakes, the artists return to their desks and begin over again. When final approval is authorized, the film is turned over to the sponsor for public consumption.
When will we see our “pencil point star” again? Constantly for the next six months; on station breaks and in the middle of our favorite TV programs. But at the end of that time he’ll return to a dank film storage building where he’ll lay in all his faded glory while another “star” is born from another pencil point.

One sentence in the story may make you scrunch up your face in confusion. Included in the list of top cartoon voices is Eddie Mayehoff. He’s pretty much unknown today. Mayehoff was a bandleader-turned-comic. In the ‘40s, he appeared in New York City night spots doing impressions and character sketches. He hosted his own radio show on WOR/Mutual starting in late 1940 and then emceed “Beat the Band” on WEAF/NBC radio in 1944. He surfaced on TV throughout the ‘50s and appeared in comic supporting roles on movies and on stage. Among the products he sold as a cartoon was Falstaff Beer in 1956. I don’t recall whether he provided any voices in theatrical cartoons; if anyone knows of one, leave a comment.

Athletic Angles

From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. I can’t make out the staff artist’s name but someone reading will know who it is.

Balletic Bathtub

There’s nothing like a bathtub coming to life and tossing toilet paper like rose petals, is there? That’s what we get in the opening scene of the first Looney Tune cartoon “Sinkin’ in the Bathtub” (1930).



And it shakes its bathtub booty and dances the Black Bottom.



The sole animation credit goes to Friz Freleng. Max Maxwell, Paul J. Smith and Norm Blackburn were also on the animation staff at the time.

Commercial TV arrives

Television didn’t just come full-blown into the world in 1948 with the major radio networks putting daily televised schedules on the air. It was around almost at the dawn of network radio in the late ‘20s and slowly evolved through the ‘30s and the war years. But there were small numbers of sets, no networks, fewer than a dozen stations and they were concentrated in fewer cities. Like early radio, it was local, simple, and devoid of commercials (and, unfortunately, live, so next to nothing of it survives for us to view).

Commercial television in the U.S. finally came due to a number of things, mainly after the FCC approved some uniform technical specifications for broadcasting and set a date. So it was that July 1, 1941 marked the start of commercial broadcasts. New York City had three stations on the air—NBC’s WNBT (which had begun life in 1928 as W2XBS), CBS’s WCBW (which had been W2XAB) and DuMont’s W2XWV, which became WABD when it went commercial. The New York Sun reported on June 28 that W2XWV wouldn’t be going on the air "because of difficulty in obtaining necessary equipment." But the station managed to rig something.

While no visual record of the first day of commercial TV exists, Broadcasting magazine of July 7, 1941, gave a pretty complete account.

Five advertisers participated in making the opening day of commercial television really commercial by sponsoring telecasts on WNBT, only station to be ready for business with a commercial license and a rate card. The latest sponsor was Missouri Pacific Lines, St. Louis, whose advertising department placed a half -hour travel film on WNBT Friday night.
The FCC last Monday, in connection with the start of commercial video the following day, issued an objective statement reviewing events leading up to full commercial authorization.
The FCC indicated that in addition to the established visual broadcast service for the New York area, three more stations expect soon to make the transition from experimental to commercial operation--Don Lee's W6XAO, Los Angeles, Zenith's W9XZV, Chicago, and Philco's W3XE, Philadelphia.
Bulova Watch Co., New York, opened and closed the day's transmissions on this station with a visual adaptation of its familiar radio time signal. A standard test pattern, fitted with hands like a clock and bearing the name of the sponsor, ticked off a full minute at 2:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. for the edification of the viewers-in. This two-program contract also provides television's first success story, for following the opening day's test the sponsor immediately signed up for daily time-signals for the standard 13-week period.
Sun Oil Co., Philadelphia, telecast the regular evening news broadcast of Lowell Thomas as it also went out to listeners over the Blue network, with Hugh James reading the commercials from a desk piled high with cans of the product. This program, sponsored as an opening day special, was placed through Roche, Williams & Cunnyngham, Chicago.
Lever Bros Co., Cambridge, Mass., treated the audience to a sight-and-sound version of its radio program, Uncle Jim's Question Bee, with the commercials presented by Aunt Jennie, star of another Lever series. For her first commercial, Aunt Jennie told of compliments her cooking has received since she started using Spry, demonstrating her remarks about its quality by opening a can and displaying its contents to the audience.
At the close of the program she cut and served to the cast and the contestants on the show an appetizing chocolate cake. While they ad libbed their appreciation, including several requests for second helpings, Aunt Jennie got in a couple of short conversational plugs for Spry. This one-time test program, handled by Ruthrauff & Ryan, New York, effectively demonstrated the ease with which television can put over a hard–hitting direct sales message.
P & G Program
Procter & Gamble Co., Cincinnati, presented an adaptation of one of its programs, Truth or Consequences, ideally adapted to the medium with its comic situations.
The commercials told the familiar "red hands" story. The camera presented a close-up of a pair of hands, red and rough from dishwashing, then dollied back to reveal a woman and a boy with a basket of groceries, including three cakes of soap.
The woman told the boy to take the two cakes of Ivory to the bathroom and to put the laundry soap on the sink for dishwashing. Then the scene was repeated with another pair of hands, this time all three cakes of soap were Ivory, pointing an obvious moral. Contestants on this show received large cakes of Ivory, whose labels were plainly visible to the audience. Compton Adv., New York, handled the program.
In addition, WNBT during the afternoon telecast the Dodgers - Phillies baseball game and in the evening put on USO program and a condensed version of a satire on Army life, written, produced and performed by the privates and non-coms of Ft. Monmounth, N. J.

And what about the other two stations? Broadcasting doesn’t reveal much more than problems.

Although beset by technical difficulties which threatened to halt the proceedings, both WCBW and W2XWV pushed through to get programs on the air on July 1. The DuMont engineers, unable to make the necessary changes in their antenna in the time allotted, rigged up a substitute temporary mast which, although not transmitting as powerful a signal, sent out pictures and sound which were clearly received by set-owners as far away as Passaic, N. J. This station's two-hour evening program included both live and film entertainment.
Troubles Galore
CBS engineers, hampered but not stopped by a broken camera circuit and the failure of the fluorescent lighting system shortly before time for the afternoon program, got WCBW on the air on schedule. Highspot of the afternoon program was a dancing lesson given to a boy and girl by Arthur Murray instructors.
Other entertainment included a newscast, with a large map behind the announcer that reversed on a central pivot to permit an immediate change of geography in keeping with the locale of the news, and a children's story-telling program, with the story illustrated by an artist drawing his sketches as the audience watched and listened.
In the evening, after further camera trouble, WCBW presented a blues singer, the first of a scheduled series on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, introduced by the museum's director, Francis Henry Taylor, and Bob Edge interviewing sports celebrities.

WNBT carried on with a 15-hour-a-week commercial schedule. CBS was still fussing around with colour TV, broadcasting Country Dance that month in colour after a black-and-white telecast earlier in the day. By 1943, W2XWV was carrying sponsored programmes on an experimental basis on Wednesday nights and finally got a commercial license the following year.

If you’re interested in the W2XBS/WNBT programming schedule, THIS web site has transcribed them from the New York Times. Unfortunately, other stations aren’t included.

Heartful Departure

When Chuck Jones used drawings of hearts in cartoons with skunks, especially in the late ‘50s, he was full of sticky sentimentality. When Tex Avery did it, he was trying to be appropriate. How else would Cupid pop out of a scene?



Animation in “Little 'Tinker” is by Bill Shull, Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons and Bob Bentley. Cupid is voiced by the guy who did George in the George and Junior cartoons.

By the way, why is it that in cartoons, skunks smell all the time?

Silent Singing

Felix the Cat leads an identical chorus of Felix the Cats in song in “Felix Revolts” (1923).



The “Ow” appears to vibrate when it’s animated as the cartoonist squashes and stretches the word.

Mayer's Son Benny

Today, show biz gossip magazines generally consist of who is sleeping with whom, who is having a kid, who is getting married/divorced, who is in/out of rehab, who is under arrest. Ah, but there was a simpler, kinder time when people were satisfied with low-down, not dirt.

With that, we reprint a feature story in the January 1936 edition of Radio Mirror on Jack Benny. An interviewer chatted with Jack’s father, who would have been 75 when this interview was conducted (he died in 1946). The story’s amusing and touching, and one wonders whether it’s the kind of gentle story the entertainment press would write today.

Jack Benny’s Father Tells All
FROM THE ONE MAN WHO REALLY KNOWS HIM COMES A MOST HUMAN AND REVEALING STORY ABOUT RADIO’S ACE COMEDIAN
By DAN WHEELER
IN suburban Lake Forest, just north of Chicago, lives a proud and happy man. His name is Mayer Kubelsky, and his son is Jack Benny.
I found him in the back room of the little haberdashery and tailor shop he founded in Lake Forest. His son-in-law, Leonard Fenchel, is the proprietor now, but Kubelsky still spends most of his time in the store, talking to old friends and to the tailor who has been with him for the past twenty-five years.
Jack Benny's father is slight, thin, upright in bearing. His hair, almost entirely gray, sweeps straight back from a high forehead, and his brown eyes, deep-set, glow with honest pleasure as he greets you. He is full of a simple, unhurried courtesy, combining the dignity of the old world with the warm humanity of the new.
It doesn't take one long, talking to him, to realize what a close bond of affection there is between him and the son who every Sunday evening makes a gift of laughter to millions of people. The inflection of his voice, the expression of his wise, kind eyes, as he speaks of Jack, tells of the sympathy and love each feels for the other.
Yet there was a time when this beautiful relationship could have been ruined forever, when Jack's future happiness and success hung on a single word. Mayer Kubelsky is thankful now that he had the wisdom to conquer the anger and prejudice in his heart, and refrain from speaking that word.
The story goes back to the days when Jack, not yet grown into long trousers, was playing violin in a movie-theater orchestra. That was in Waukegan, Illinois, Jack's birthplace. The Kubelskys had the attitude of their race toward music—as something primarily a part of one's life, not a means of making a living—and the thought of music as a career for Jack had never entered his father's mind.
No, the orchestra job was looked on as a source of pocket-money for the boy—that and good experience. In the meanwhile, he would continue going to school and, when the time came, would take charge of the clothing business. Since 1885, Kubelsky had been working to build up a prosperous commercial establishment, a worthy bequest to leave a clever and energetic only son. Not that young Jack, in those days, showed any particular aptitude for a merchandising career. "I left him alone in the store one day when I had to go to Chicago," Kubelsky reminisced. "When I come back, a policeman meets me at the depot.
" 'We want you to come over to the station and identify some pants,' he tells me. So I go with him to the police station, and there, sure enough, are about a dozen pair of pants from my store.
"I go home and I say to Jack, 'Did you have some customers?' He tells me no, just one man who wanted to look at shoes.
"'But,' I say, 'you sold some pants, didn't you?' And that makes Jack angry, because he thinks I am accusing him of selling some pants and not giving me the money. 'No, Father,' he says, 'I did not, either, sell any pants!'
"And this is how it was," Kubelsky, his eyes twinkling, rose from his chair and demonstrated to me with gestures. "Here is the man sitting down, and right behind him are the pants, and every time Jack turns away to get another pair of shoes, the man reaches behind him and grabs a few pair of pants and puts them into his suitcase. But Jack didn't even miss them when the man left—without buying any shoes, either!"
On another occasion Jack, left in charge of the store; fell asleep, probably from sheer boredom. Once he complained, his nose wrinkling in disgust after he had sold a pair of shoes to a long-unwashed farmer, "Father, you want me to make my living that way?"

But, his father thought, the boy would outgrow this distaste for business as he grew older and learned that work is the lot of every man, and he was entirely unprepared when, at the end of his second year in high school, Jack announced that he wanted to go on the stage.
The stage! It was unthinkable to the elder Kubelsky.
Every instinct in him rebelled against permitting his son to lead the life of a roving vaudeville performer. His mouth set in grim lines.
"Where do you get this crazy idea?" he asked.
"Miss Salisbury, the pianist in the theater orchestra, says I can play the violin well enough to go in vaudeville," Jack told him, white-faced but determined.
"She should mind her own business," he growled.
For several days they argued the point, the father reiterating his contention that stage folk were bums, riff-raff, immoral, and no good; the son sticking tenaciously to but one argument—that to play his violin in vaudeville was the one thing in life he wanted to do. As Kubelsky realized how serious and determined Jack was, his anger mounted. At last he said, all the bitterness and pain in his heart spilling over into his voice:
"All right, then, go on the stage! But remember this. You are leaving your home behind you. You can never come back to it—never again! When this show business has made a bum out of you living in some cheap room, hungry, lonesome, maybe you'll think about the home you could have had, if you'd had the sense to keep it!"
Jack accepted the ultimatum. Only one who knows the solidarity of true family life can realize what it cost him to defy his father and leave him in anger.
"All right, Father," he said quietly. "But that isn't what I'll think about. If I get to be like you say—a bum—it won't be because I went on the stage. It'll be because I haven't any home!"
THE anger drained out of Kubelsky's heart. He had a swift, terrible vision of what Jack's life might be. Not the physical and financial hardships, they didn't matter. He'd had to endure them himself, when, a boy in his teens, he had left his native Russia and come to America, to escape the long period of compulsory military service forced on everyone by the Czar's government. But he had not left his parents in anger. That made all the difference. Through all the hardships of starting life in Chicago as a peddler, he had been conscious of his parents' love, even though they were thousands of miles away. He had not been so alone, somehow, not alone and embittered, as Jack would be if he sent him away now. He realized that knowing he had a home, filled with sympathy and understanding, to return to if all did not go well, might spell the difference between success and failure for his boy.
"You are right, son," he said. "I can't say anything more. I wish you luck, but —but you will always be welcome, whatever happens, here with your mother and me."
So Jack took the surname of Benny and in company with another boy, a pianist, formed the vaudeville team of Benny and Woods. Success came slowly at first, of course. Jack Benny was not a comedian in those days—that came later, during the war, after he had made a totally unexpected hit as an "orderly to the Admiral" in a Navy comic skit. The Benny and Woods act was Straight music, but it was good, and gradually bookings became better and more plentiful.
Every week Jack sent a good part of his pay envelope home to his father. If he did not send as much as usual, he wrote and explained why the amount was short. Kubelsky did not use the money for himself; the understanding was that it was Jack's money, to be saved and invested for him by his father. Only once did Kubelsky draw upon the sum. That was in 1915, when he was forced into bankruptcy and lost his store in Waukegan. A week later, Jack began an engagement in Chicago. With shocked amazement, he learned of the disaster.
"But why didn't you take my money?" he cried. "Or wire and ask me for it, if you didn't want to take it?" "I wouldn't take it without asking you," his father said. "And I knew if I asked you, you would say 'Yes' without hesitating, but I would not know if you meant it."
"Well, you'll take it now," Jack insisted; and Kubelsky did, using it to establish himself in a new store in Lake Forest, where he is now.
"Tears came to my eyes," he confessed to me. "Yes I cried, a grown man. I could not help it."
The financial arrangement between father and son endured even after success had come to Jack, even until six years ago, three years after Jack's marriage to Mary Livingstone. Not until then did he write and say that now, he thought, he could take care of his own finances!
Jack and Mary were married in January of 1927, just two weeks after Jack's sister, Florence, had become the bride of Leonard Fenchel. Florence's wedding had been timed to occur when Jack was working in Chicago. A few days after his arrival, he told his father that he wanted to be married, too. There was a girl he'd met in Los Angeles. . . .
Kubelsky said nothing for a day or two. Then, "I want you to ask this girl to come to Chicago in time for Florence's wedding. And for Sunday dinner with us."
The arrangements were made. Mary gave up her job in Los Angeles, came out to Chicago, was present at the wedding. The Sunday dinner, a ceremonial Sunday dinner, was accomplished. And Jack took Mary back to her hotel in Chicago.
When he returned to Lake Forest, his father said gravely, "Jack, I want you to do me a favor."
"What is it, Father?" asked Jack nervously.
"I want you to get married before we go to Florida next week," Kubelsky said, letting drop the mask of solemnity he had worn, and grinning broadly.
When he had finished telling me this, Kubelsky smiled and reached for a slip of yellow paper lying on his desk. "I was made so happy yesterday," he said. "Look." It was a telegram, printed on a special Jewish New Year blank: "Happy New Year to Grandfather from his loving granddaughter Joan."
Joan is the baby girl Jack and Mary adopted a year ago, already as dear to them as their own child. Since she is still several years short of being able to write telegrams herself, the source of the New Years greeting was obvious.
As we sat there, Kubelsky and I, his eyes grew misty with memories—memories of Jack's childhood and maturity, incidents which vividly revealed the man as only his father knows him.
He began to take music lessons when he was only six years old," Kubelsky said, chuckling. "His violin teacher wouldn't let him play anything but scales for three years—scales and 'Home Sweet Home.' He said to Jack. 'When you get tired of scales you can play "Home Sweet Home," but nothing else.'
"He wouldn't practice unless his mother and I would listen—no! And when his grandfather and grandmother came to visit us, then is when he was happy! He would line up a row of chairs in the parlor, and we would all sit and listen while he played his scales and 'Home Sweet Home!'
"He was always so generous, just like he is now. Once when he was a little boy he asked us for a dime to go to a movie. We gave it to him, and he went away, but in a few minutes he was back. 'Didn't you go to the movie?' I asked him.
" 'No,' he said. 'A man asked me for a dime to get something to eat, so I gave my money to him.'
"He never used to be riding his own bicycle, always he would have loaned it to some other boy. And once—you know, they say beggars make marks on houses to show which ones they can get food at? I believe it, because always beggars would turn in at our gate. One time Mrs. Kubelsky told a man who came to the door to wait a minute, but when she came back with some food he was gone.
" 'He must have misunderstood me and thought I said no,' she said; and Jack was so angry with her! 'Now, Mother, see what you've done!' he said, and went running down the street to catch the man and bring him back!"
By the time you read this, Mayer Kubelsky will be with Jack, either in Hollywood or Florida. For years Jack has given his father several weeks in Florida every winter, as a Christmas present. "Often Jack is there, too." Kubelsky told me, "and every morning, before he leaves the hotel, he comes into my room and kisses me good morning."
But if Jack remains in Hollywood, and his father joins him there, I hope he doesn't go to too many of Jack's broadcasts. They tell a story in New York of the time he attended a broadcast there, and was so nervous, for Jack's sake, that he couldn't sit still. Just one more incident, told as Kubelsky told it to me. More than anything else, it seems to illustrate the beautiful relationship between these two men:
"When Jack left home to go on the stage, I asked of him one thing. I told him he must go every New Year's Day, at least, and every Sabbath that he could, to a synagogue. But I had forgotten all about telling him this, it was so long ago, when one day came a letter from him saying, 'Father, I am so sorry, but I could not go to a synagogue last New Year's Day. I was working all day long, and couldn't get away. I hope you will forgive me.'
"I had forgotten," said Kubelsky, "but he had not."