Too Many Screwys

Meathead finds he hasn’t captured Screwy Squirrel in a sack. Screwy’s right there in front of him. Here’s the take.



Then Meathead’s head twirls around. Here are a few drawings.



The picture’s screwy enough with one squirrel, so Meathead takes care of the extra.



And the chase continues.

Animation in “Happy-Go-Nutty” is credited to Ed Love, Ray Abrams and Preston Blair.

Everglade Raid Background

If nothing else, the Walter Lantz cartoons of the late ‘50s had the nice work of Ray Jacobs and Art Landy. I don’t know whether one did layouts and the other backgrounds or if they switched off.

Here’s one of their pieces from “Everglade Raid” (1958), the first cartoon when Woody Woodpecker takes on an alligator that sounds like a slightly-enthusiastic Huckleberry Hound.



Landy had been a background artist at Disney. His last theatrical credit was on Lantz’s “Window Pains” (1967). Jacobs left Lantz around 1960 to work for Jack Kinney, then drew layouts for Filmation and Hanna-Barbera.

Television Worries

In 1947, there was television, but there wasn’t television.

There were about a dozen stations scattered across the U.S. and no hook-up between the east and west coasts. The networks, such as they were, didn’t offer programming during much of the week, and all the big stars were still on radio.

But television had been steadily developing after the war and the FCC was in the process of tripling the number of stations with the granting of licenses. The big stars of radio knew it would just be a matter of time before TV would be calling them.

Television may have still been developing in 1947 but Jack Benny could already see the pitfalls for someone like himself. Radio painted pictures in people’s minds. Seeing the same thing on screen couldn’t possibly measure up to someone’s imagination. And Jack realised that TV would swallow material even more than radio. No doubt that’s why he committed himself to only four shows on his first season in 1950-51.

As it turned out, Benny didn’t do “a whole new kind of program” as he predicted. In fact, many of his successful routines on TV were taken from old radio scripts, in some cases verbatim. Here’s what he had to say in a United Press column that appeared in newspapers beginning September 24, 1947. As a matter of interest, the Brooklyn Eagle of that day reveal TV listings in New York City consisting of test patterns, news, a movie, sports events, a kids’ show, a soap opera (“Highway to the Stars”) and a disc jockey programme. It’d be a year before the Uncle Miltie phenomenon made manufacturers of TV sets very happy and profitable.

Jack Benny Fears Television Advent Will Spoil Act
By VIRGINIA MacPHERSON
United Press Hollywood Correspondent

HOLLYWOOD, Sept. 24 (U.P.)—Television, Jack Benny lamented today, will probably louse up that nice, soft deal he's worked 16 years to perfect. He'll have to start all over.
So, he says, will every ether radio funnyman. Which is probably why the veteran jokesters are beating no drums to hurry up this miracle of the air waves.
“All the comedy shows—as we know 'em—will die out,” Benny says. “You'll have a whole new kind of program. I imagine we'll have to go in for plays. Heaven help my writers!”
No more peering through spectacles at neatly-typed scripts. The scripts will have to go. So will those spectacles. And ditto for the sound effects.
“Because the audience will be looking right smack at us,” Benny explained. “And we'll never be able to get as wild over a television screen as the listeners have us get in their own minds.”
Take that business of “tightwad” Benny clomping down to the basement vault.
“We could do that for television,” he said, “but it'd never be as funny. Neither would the squeaking hinges. Or my smoking old Maxwell. Or making Phil Harris put his dimes in my cigarette machine. All those gimmicks paint mental pictures that are twice as hilarious as what really goes on.”
The only funnyman who won't have to begin from the bottom again, Benny figures, are the boys who rely on visual antics for their giggles. “People like Billy De Wolfe and Danny Kaye and Danny Thomas,” plugged the only man in the business who can afford to. “They don't have situation comedy. They are funny just to watch.
“Fred Allen's puss might be, too.” Benny added. “But he's not taking any chances on the kind of chuckles the Benny pan might bring on.
“Nope, what we'll have to do is a fast switch to half-hour comedies,” he said, “and that'll be murder. I don't see how we could do a show oftener than once a month.”
Benny figures it'll take him that long to get that “hilarious” play written, sets built, costumes made up, cast hired, and all his lines memorized. His only consolation is that old “enemy Allen” will be in the same fix.
Meanwhile, he's starting his 16th consecutive year Oct. 5 on good, old-fashioned radio. And he's plenty thankful that television's still limited to fights and football games.
“By the time everybody has a home set,” Benny grinned, “I'll probably be too old anyway. Let the kids worry about it I'll be retired to the golf links.”

Ed Barge on Tom and Jerry

This is post is thanks to reader Roger Niccum. Roger dug up an article on Ed Barge, one of the main animators of Tom and Jerry for many years, from the Bakersfield Californian of April 11, 1944. Barge talks about making Tom and Jerry. The photo accompanied the original story.

SHARING BETWEEN THE SHEARS
By MAE SAUNDERS
Tom and Jerry are served up, not just at Christmas time, by Eddie Barge, artist and one of the chief animators in Movietone cartoons at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. Tom and Jerry are the artists pals every day when he picks up his brushes. Mr. Barge, who received preliminary art training in Bakersfield schools, began work in Hollywood a number of years ago as an artist who did much of the hack work that goes into putting together a motion picture cartoon. Now as one of the chief animators, he blocks in the main story scenes, meeting the requirements of the director. “Tom” and “Jerry” are his chief pals at M-G-M studio and there’s not a whisker that Tom and Jerry have between them that the artist hasn’t flicked impressively. In the motion picture cartoons, a little laugh is a big thing, artistically speaking. It’s the artist that really broadens the comedy with a line here and a line there.

Chief joy to the beholder in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, which by the way won the Academy award last year, is the theme of courage and resourcefulness of the little guy, the mouse, as pitted against brute force, the cat.
The making of motion picture cartoons is an art by itself requiring the co-ordination of many artists, timed perfectly to action and plot, blocked in colors, placement against background, and the final trimmings, all put to appropriate music.
There are approximately 50 or 60 sconces in an average cartoon. There are about four animators necessary to every picture. Artist crews can only turn out about six pictures a year.
Each drawing is “shot” twice; there are about 16 “frames” or 8 drawings to each foot and a half of film that is projected on the screen every second.
There are about 12 individual drawings every second on the screen. The average cartoon used to be about 800 feet, but it is now about 600 feet. This means an average of 6000 drawings per film.
The artist makes pencil sketches and these are run off by the director to test story strength. Sometimes drawings are changed to exaggerate action or subdue it.
The “personality” pictures with much facial expression are the most difficult to do, says the artist.
All the sound effects are marked carefully and the artist must make the sound and action synchronize in his work.
Many fine artists collaborate in making the cartoons, including voice experts, famous quartets and ventriloquists. Joke men and gag men work with directors on cartoon stories.
And, says the artist, it’s all done for the laugh.
Barge originally planned a career as a newspaper cartoonist, got his first job by walking into a Hollywood studio and showing them his drawings. Now he is getting regular screen credit for his work.

Edward John Barge was born on August 29, 1910 in Santa Clara, California to Alfred Edward and Margaret Gwendoline (Gannon) Barge. His father was an Englishman who worked for the Santa Fe Railway, settling in California around 1909 after living in Colorado. The family briefly moved to Kamloops, B.C., where Barge’s brother Al was born and his father is in the 1913 city directory as a brakeman for the Canadian Pacific Railway. But they were back in Bakersfield area by Christmas time 1916 as Barge and his older brother Henry played brownies in the Catholic parish’s children’s pageant (I suspect he never revealed this to his animation colleagues).

Barge’s name was typeset on the sports page of the Californian a number of times. He played local baseball and basketball after graduating from school. In fact, he broke his leg in 1933 and a benefit baseball game was staged for him (the Depression was on, you know). The last I can find of Barge in the Bakersfield area is in July 1936.

He then headed to Los Angeles and got a job at the Harman-Ising studio before moving on to MGM; he was paid $1560 in 1939. In the ‘40s, he animated not only for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, but in the George Gordon and Lah-Blair units. Barge’s last cartoon for the studio was apparently “Feedin’ the Kiddie” (released in 1957). Barge wasn’t at the studio when it closed that year; Broadcasting magazine of May 7, 1956 reported he, Morrie Zukor and Ron Maidenberg all left MGM to work for Animation, Inc. as an art director, assistant animator and story sketch artist, respectively. Barge was there into the 1960s. He later ended up working for his old bosses again on his old characters and other lesser Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons.

Barge died in Los Angeles on September 29, 1991.

Thugs Backgrounds

Some background drawings from the great Warners cartoon “Thugs With Dirty Mugs” (released 1939). I presume they’re by Johnny Johnsen.

Up Jumps the Devil

You’ve seen cartoons where a devil version and an angel version of a character tell him how to behave. The idea goes back to the silent film era, although in “Bobby Bumps at the Circus” (1916) only features a generic devil and angel.

The devil rises up from, well, you know where. The angel just appears from nowhere.



In the end, Fido listens to the devil. After all, the circus owner does owe him and Bobby for a performance. Fido then takes the money (a $500 bill?) the circus owner has dropped to Bobby’s father, who can now pay his debts.

Gagging on Gags

Imagine one week you’re starring on your own show, and the next week you’re a supporting player on a show that’s taken your time-slot and sponsor. That’s what Louise Erickson had to endure.

It was no surprise, though. Billboard announced in its August 21, 1948 issue that Tums had purchased Alan Young to replace Erickson’s “A Date With Judy.” Judy’s contract ran until January 4, 1949. On January 11th, the Young show made its debut on NBC, costing $8,500 to produce, compared to $4,700 for “Judy.”

In a way, it wasn’t a debut. It was another in a series of shows featuring Young as a clutzy, eager young man with a girl-friend hinting at romance one minute and exasperated at his antics the next. Erickson joined Doris Singleton and Jean Gillespie on the list of actresses playing his suitors. It was a concept that was neither new to Young, nor to radio. Young was already busy. He was co-hosting a variety show with Jimmy Durante, having walked from “The Texaco Star Theatre” in March for not giving him enough air time. And he found time to get married to singer Virginia McCurdy in Tijuana during the run of the show.

How long Erickson stayed on the show is buried in newspapers or radio columns I haven’t uncovered. Broadcasting of March 22nd reported she had rejoined the cast of “Meet Corliss Archer.” The New York Times radio listings for April 26th list Shirley Mitchell in Young’s cast instead of Erickson. “A Date With Judy” returned to the air in the fall on another network (initially without a sponsor). George O’Hanlon took over July 12th as Young’s summer replacement. But Young never returned. The Times’ TV listings grew slowly over the course of 1948 and 1949, with new stations and longer programming days, as well as expanded networks. That’s where the stars were going and that’s where Young went.

Newspaperdom’s best-known radio critic may have been John Crosby, and he got to the bottom of what was wrong with Young’s radio show, which was written by Dave Schwartz, Artie Stander and Joe Young (Bob Fisher joined the staff in March). The column appeared in papers beginning April 18th. You’ll note the sly reference to Don Wilson’s best-known sponsor of the day. Young’s competition, by the way, was “Mr. and Mrs. North” (CBS), “America’s Town Meeting” (ABC, simulcast on TV) and “Share the Wealth” (Mutual). He was the lead-in for Bob Hope.

RADIO IN REVIEW
By JOHN CROSBY
NEW YORK—The Alan Young show (NBC, 8:30 p.m. EST Tuesdays) is described in NBC press releases as situation and gag comedy, which is exactly what it is.
The situations aren't bad. The gags are awful. That doesn't mean necessarily that Young is batting .500. Some of his shows are almost all gags and his average sinks to .019. Others are almost all situation comedy in which case his batting average is more respectable.
Young plays the part of harassed, earnest, dewy-eyed young man, a sort of contemporary Harold Lloyd, who wants to be an actor and hasn't got anywhere. He has an agent named Ed Brady who steals his clothes and gambles all his money away on the horses. (The starting gate usually comes in ahead of Brady's horses.) He has a girl, Betty, who adores him but whose parents don't. She has a small, cynical brother who views his sister with the detachment of small, cynical brothers. Sounds pretty familiar, doesn't, it? Well, it is.

The one original note in the Young show is struck by Jim Backus, who plays the part of Hubert Updike, the biggest snob in radio. Updike, a wealthy young man whose accent is a parody of Harvard's, gives away all his folding money because the creases spoil the pictures, and likes to stroll in his garden to give his flowers a chance to smell him. He has blue jaundice. (You can't get it in this country. He had to send abroad for it).
Over the years Updike has developed a number of other eccentricities. He had to sell his new Cadillac because the tune played by the horn fell to No. 3 on the Hit Parade. And once he knocked a pedestrian 250 feet and had him arrested for leaving the scene of an accident.
Backus, who plays this highly flavored young man, is easily one of the best stooges in the business. I just hope they don't make a featured comic of him. You have to take Updike in small doses.
I'm also rather fond of the young brother, a perceptive little brat. Once when Young was scheduled to leave town and wailed that this would remove him from the sight of his girl friend's beautiful face, this youngster informed him that her eye lashes came off, her red cheeks came off, her lips came off. "I can put it in a box and ship it to you," he said.
There are a couple of other stooges—Nicodemus [Stewart], a colored man who sounds like his name, and Mr. Beagle, a nasal New England type who sounds like all the other nasal New England types! Young, in fact, is in danger of being overwhelmed by his own stooges. He's a personable and likable young man, but in this show he has surrounded himself with so many spicy characters he is easily the dimmest member of the cast. As to those terrible gags, if you want don’t want to take my word for it, here are some samples:
“Gamble all my money in a plumber’s shop? Oh, I couldn’t. I’m no plunger.”
“What do you want to be an actor for? One day you’re making love to Betty Grable, the next day you’re a has-been.”
“Yeah, but look where you has been.”
That’s enough for everyone?
One last word. Tums, which used to have the world’s worst commercials, no longer has the world’s worst commercials. Tums has Don Wilson in there pitching now and Wilson’s mellow voice—so round, so firm, so fully packed—is probably the only one in existence which can take the curse off all that chatter about acid indigestion.

Both Updike and Young went onto better things. Young won two Emmys for his early TV show, but later gained fame co-starring for six seasons with Mr. Ed and had a fine cartoon voice acting career. Updike was given a new name by a chap named Sherwood Schwartz and placed on an island with six other stranded castaways. And there he remains in endless reruns of “Gilligan’s Island” to this day.

Singed Duck a la Sutherland

John Sutherland Productions produced some enjoyable animation during its lifetime, paying good money to get top people who had worked at other studios.

Here’s a neat little scene from later in the studio’s life called “A Missile Named Mac” (1962) made for Bell Labs. A coonskin-hatted hunter fires his rifle, nicking a duck casually sailing through the air in the butt. The duck isn’t happy. Here are some of the drawings.



Animation on this short is done on twos by Gerald Baldwin and Lefty Callahan. If the designs remind you of either UPA or Jay Ward, it’s because they’re by Bob Dranko, who worked at both studios. Baldwin was a Jay Ward vet as well, while Callahan went on to a long career at Hanna-Barbera, having assisted the funny Irv Spence at MGM in the ‘50s.

Lotsa Heel-Wathas

There was a gag in the old Oswald the Rabbit cartoons, and later in the Bosko cartoons released by Warners where the character would crash and split into a bunch of little versions of himself.

Whether Tex Avery’s paying homage or simply borrowing the gag, I don’t know, but he uses it in “Big Heel-Watha” (1944). And because he’s sped it up, the gag is funnier than it was 15 years earlier.



The Heel-Wathas run into each other and reform into one person. These are consecutive frames.



Heel-Watha runs out of the scene, stage right. But one little Heel-Watha runs into the scene, stage left. He’s been left behind. And he stays that way forever, apparently, as the cartoon moves on to the next scene.



Heck Allen gets the story credit. Preston Blair, Ray Abrams and Ed Love are the credited animators.

Inside Jack Benny

There were just so many biographical stories about Jack Benny that journalists could write before they went looking for a new angle. And one of them was the psychological angle.

Judging by what Jack told Lloyd Shearer, several news people had done it before. That doesn’t stop Shearer from doing it again. Whether he succeeds, we’ll leave to you. This lengthy piece appeared in the magazine supplement of a number of newspapers beginning September 13, 1964.

Shearer not only wrote under his own name, he simultaneously penned “Personality Parade” in Parade magazine, also a newspaper supplement, from 1958 to 1991. He died of a heart attack in 2001 and had battled Parkinson’s for a number of years.

WHAT MAKES JACK BENNY RUN
by LLOYD SHEARER
HOLLYWOOD. On Friday, September 25, Jack Benny, an American institution of 70, will begin his 15th season on television and his 55th in show business.
Before the current season is finished, this beloved funnyman will have been tuned in by more video-viewers than any other performer of our time. In addition to his weekly Friday night stint over NBC at $75,000 per program, Benny will be telecast by CBS, the network he recently left, via two sets of old shows. One is called Sunday with Jack Benny, on from 5 to 5:30 P.M. The other set of reruns is entitled The Jack Benny Program and will be shown each weekday starting October 5, from to 4:30 to 5 P.M.
Ordinarily such overexposure—no other comic is on TV six days a week—would doom any comedian. But Jack Benny is not "any" comedian.
In the course of five decades he has devised such a sure stimulus to the public funny-bone that he has become a legend in his own time, a household staple, a seemingly basic ingredient of the American culture—the lovable, endearing cheap skate with the helpless, glazed look, the inept butt of his own fabricated miserliness. He is the indispensable comedian perennially welcomed and wanted by the people.
No comedian of this century has sustained his success and popularity as long as Jack Benny. The longevity of his career—it started in 1909—is amazing. Almost all his contemporaries—Eddie Cantor, Groucho Marx, Ben Bernie, Phil Baker, Fred Allen, Will Rogers—have either died or passed into semi-retirement.
Only Benny continues to meet the challenge, to come out week after week, standing there on stage, arms crossed, egg on his face, warm, good-natured, done in by the script, evoking smiles, titters and sometimes buffs of laughter by his audience.
WHAT'S THE HITCH?

One imagines that age 70 would find Jack a happy, peaceful, serene, fulfilled personality. Best-paid comedian in the world—he grosses somewhere around $5,000,000 a year—admired and respected by fans the world over, honored and emulated by members of his own fraternity, happily married since 1927 to his first and only wife, incredibly healthy, surprisingly youthful-looking without once ever having submitted to a face lift—"I never would have got one if I needed it, but luckily I never have"—possessor of every creature comfort from Rolls-Royce to Beverly Hills mansion, Benny is nevertheless an insecure, frequently troubled man bedeviled by moods of moroseness and depression, nagged by a feeling of unfulfillment and inferiority.
From time to time he wanders aimlessly along the streets of Beverly Hills, a loner, a man occasionally given to crotchetiness or hypochondria, or he drives dispiritedly around Los Angeles or plays a solitary round of golf at the Hillcrest Country Club, a man in search of life's meaning, not knowing how or where to find it, an incomplete and unrequited man, a paradox and anomaly.
In an effort to find out what makes Benny tick—he's a fascinating human being to interview, glib and stimulating, unphilosophical but eloquent, full of dicta and contradictions—I asked him if in the winter of his life he liked the kind of man he had become.
"Not entirely," he answered frankly, "because I have a lot of faults that I shouldn't have. For instance, one of the things I don't like about myself is being moody. But nobody knows that, except maybe my wife or people very close to me." Benny is convinced that only he and his wife and intimates are privy to his weaknesses. He believes firmly that from all others he manages to hide his inadequacies.
MORNINGS ARE BEST
"You," he continued, "would never know that I'm moody in a million years. My closest friends would never know it. They think I'm the same jolly guy all the time. Good time Charlie! But I get moody more than I should. And I don't know what starts it off.
"Usually it starts late in the afternoon and then by night it's over again. I feel best in the mornings. In fact I try to do all my work in the mornings if I can. I get much more work done. I'm an early riser. I like to get up early and do things. I practice my violin. The only thing I like to do late is play golf. But everything else I do in the morning.
"I'm not a party comedian. I don't know how to be funny in people's homes like many comedians—George Burns or Bob Hope or Jerry Lewis or Milton Berle. This I know nothing about. I'm a good listener.
"Maybe. I'm moody because I'm a perfectionist. I want my shows to be good. But I must say this, that years ago I was much more nervous than I am now. I find my work a lot easier. Years ago I placed too much importance on every performance. Let's say when I was really 39, I had a feeling that everything had to be perfect. It didn't have to be at all, but I thought it had to, and that made me nervous.
"Some people think I'm insecure. But I don't think so. Maybe a long time ago I was, even after I had success for a while. But now it's too late for me to be insecure. Financially, I'm pretty safe. I maybe should be worth millions more and could have been if I were a good business man. But money doesn't mean that much to me. I've got enough to be secure. To have security money is the first thing you should have—for your wife, family, kids, grandchildren. So I have that. Fortunately I also have my health. Career-wise, the public still wants me. But let's go to another extreme. Let's say that I've had enough of TV and maybe the audience has had enough of me. I still have concerts that I can give. Mine are always very successful. They never miss. I could do stage plays. I could do shows. Probably make a picture or two like Chevalier does by playing older parts. Why should I get moody or feel insecure?"
I suggested to Benny the possibility that he might not really like being a comedian, that perhaps he had always secretly hankered to become a business tycoon or a leading man like Cary Grant. "What omissions have there been in your life?" I asked.— " 'Omissions?' " Benny toyed with the word while he played with his spectacles. "I think," he declared, "that Mary and I should have adopted more than one child. That's a mistake I made. We adopted only Joan. But of course, right after that, Mary was going to have a baby herself, which she lost. So then I felt we should have adopted another couple of kids. But somehow we didn't. I kind of miss that. I would have liked to have had more kids, and more grandchildren.
"About being someone else," he went on, "if miracles could be performed, I guess I would like to be one of the world's great violinists. Then I could give concerts legitimately. They wouldn't take in as much as they do now and they wouldn't be as interesting. But I would like to do that for about a year. If I could go back to being 50 or 60 and feeling as good as I feel now, that also would be wonderful. But otherwise, I'd like to stay right where I am."
Many of the comic's friends say that Benny's inferiority complex is founded in his lack of formal education. Born Benny Kubelsky, son of Russian Jewish immigrants who opened a saloon in Waukegan, Ill., Benny left school in the ninth grade to take an $8-per-week job playing the violin in the pit of the Barrison Theatre. He never returned to school, but claims he has mixed feelings about his inadequate education.
"If you want to be in show business," he declares flatly—"let's say as an entertainer or a comedian—a college education isn't good for that. It's not conducive to good comedy. You should never go further than high school. Very few men who have gone through college have become successful comedians.
"To be a successful comedian you've got to stay down to earth. There's something about having had a good college education that keeps you a little bit too aloof. Your wordings, expressions and delivery and the words you put together in a sentence for comedy become, I would say, a little too brilliant. It just isn't funny. I think that maybe writers could go to college without suffering. But even they, if they have a good high school education, would be better off.
"You asked me what I've missed in life. I'll tell you. I never even went to high school. You would never know it. Nobody would ever know it the way I now conduct myself. But I never had a proper education. I finished school in public school. I went one year, to high school. I haven't got too much knowledge. I missed that. I even missed a public school education because I wouldn't study. I wouldn't learn anything. Whatever I learned, I learned all by myself. But I wished I had more—at least a great college education."
I repeated to Benny what he had previously said about a college education not mixing with comedy. "Maybe," he conceded, "an education would have kept me from reaching my present position. But it wouldn't have made any difference. I wouldn't have known any better. Now, at my age in life, when am I going to go to college? I don't have time for it.
"A lot of people when they got old took courses in college. I remember Fred Allen did. He took English at Columbia. I've been wanting to do that for years. Just never got to it. So that's the only thing I miss, a proper education. But as I say, nobody else knows about that except me. Who could possibly guess that by talking to me?
"I regret the fact that if a book is hard reading I have a difficult time with it. My mind wanders. I have too many other things to think about. If I had had a good education, my brain would work in the proper way. It would be used to hard reading, hard thinking.
BAFFLED BY VIETNAM
"To tell you the truth I have a hard time understanding the whole situation in Vietnam. But I'm not the only one. Even highly educated people don't know what's going on. But I'm not as well versed in politics as I'd like to be.
"This is due to lack of education. Some people like Georgie Jessel have educated themselves. Georgie practically never went to school at all. But he was able to do it himself.
"You see, the trouble with me was that when I first got into show business, I toured in vaudeville in 1911. I liked it too much. I stayed in it instead of going back to school.
"Now, I'll tell you where a better education would have helped me. I'm a pretty good writer. I'd rather say co-writer. I'm a good co-everything: co-producer, co-director, co-writer and a real good editor. That's my business, but if I had the education that I wanted, I would have been a really good writer. I would have been able to write plays. With my sense of humor, with the ideas that I turn over to my writers and the fact that I'm such a good editor—that's the only thing I brag about. I am a great editor—then I would have been a truly fine writer.
"It isn't the fact that I have a lousy vocabulary. I haven't. My vocabulary is all right. I just never use it."
Like most headliners of the show business world, Jack Benny isn't particularly sure of his true identity. He does know, however, what he is not. "I am definitely," he asserts, "not the kind of guy I play on stage and I'm constantly amazed that so many people, even sophisticated people, think I am."
A few weeks ago, for example, Benny was interviewed by a reporter who asked him seriously, "How long have you owned a Maxwell?" Maxwell is the name of an automobile popular in the early years of the century. Benny dropped the name into one of his early radio broadcasts as a humor prop, but many fans believe he still retains such a vehicle.
In truth Jack drives an $18,000 Rolls-Royce. When he bought it 3 years ago, he proudly drove it to the home of his oldest and best friend, comic George Burns. The Burns' maid inspected the sedan with its ultraconservative lines, later remarked to her employer, "With all his money, you'd think Mr. Benny wouldn't drive such an old-fashioned car."
Benny is constantly embarrassed by repeated references to himself as a veteran penny pincher. To dispel that specter he always overtips: $1 to a doorman, $5 to a cabbie, $10 to a waiter.
As a vaudevillian in the 1920's, Jack used to eat regularly in many of the automat restaurants, where nickels are dropped into machines to permit the purchaser to lift a glass window and extricate his food. For years following his great success, Benny was most anxious to continue eating in these New York City restaurants, but was fearful that his fans would recognize and chastise him as a miser.
HOW TO EAT IN THE AUTOMAT

Not too long ago lie finally figured out how to dine in the automat without embarrassment. He took over the entire branch on 45th Street, invited 400 guests, hired a dance band, installed 3 bars and hosted a gala black-tie affair. As each guest arrived Jack handed him $3 in nickels to work the food machines.
Benny claims sadly that he suffers from a poor money sense. "I don't think anybody throws more money away than Mary and I do. Unfortunately I know very little about economics." But here again, what Jack Benny actually is and what he thinks he is are two different men.
In the entertainment industry he has long been recognized as a shrewd cookie when it comes to finance. In 1948 he moved his program from NBC to CBS, got Bill Paley of CBS to pay $2,260,000 for Amusements, Inc., a company he controlled. In 1961 he sold his production company, J and M Productions, for $2,750,000 in Music Corporation of America stock. In both deals lie made fortunes in capital gains.
A few months ago, fed up with the tactics of Jim Aubrey, CBS program chief, he gave Aubrey's network exactly five days to pick up his option. When the network stalled he promptly signed next day with NBC, where the executives rolled out the financial red carpet for him, meeting all his demands.
By nature a generous man, Benny likes to be treated generously by others. His public cheap skate image bugs him. He was particularly elated therefore when the late President Kennedy wrote him a thank-you note for a money clip he had sent to the White House via Peter Lawford. The money clip contained a single dollar bill, but Kennedy wrote that he for one knew how truly extravagant Benny really was. He was sure Jack had sent him not $1 but $750, and he was equally sure, he joked, that Peter Lawford had kept $749 as his commission.
Unlike most comedians who are tyrannical and temperamental with their employees—especially their writers—Benny is kind, thoughtful and tactful. His four writers and his cast of characters, Don Wilson, Rochester, Mel Blanc and Dennis Day, have worked with and for him from 15 to 32 years. Benny has almost always treated them as gentlemen. "I am not interested in myself," he tells them over and over again. "I'm interested in the continued excellence of our show.
BE A DIPLOMAT
"I've learned over the years" Benny maintains, "that one of the most important things in life is human relationships. I start on the supposition that people are just as sensitive as I am, writers are even more so.
"For me the best time to work with my writers and cast is in the morning, that's when I'm most cheerful. I've learned never to tell anybody, especially writers, that this stinks or this satire is lousy, because then I merely put them in an antagonistic frame of mind.
"In the first place, my writers don't write lines which stink. They get too much money for that. Second, I may disagree with them but I listen anyway. I like to let everybody know they're doing a good job, and even though it's for selfish purposes, I get the best results that way.
"I'm not an ad-libber. You know what Fred Allen said about me? I couldn't ad-lib a belch after a Hungarian dinner. But I appreciate ad-libs and wit and humor and talent. Nobody laughs as hard and as genuinely as I do at the routines and jokes of other comedians. I appreciate them and I don't mind showing it.
"This isn't because I'm such a nice guy. I know it's the way to get results, to make friends, to make life pleasant. We all have selfish motives. Everybody thinks I'm a nice guy because I give concerts for charity, because I go overseas to entertain the troops, because I play at benefits. The selfish motive is that I like to do those things. They give me pleasure.
"Writers like to make me out a very complex screwed up guy. They say I have everything in life I can possibly want, that there's no need for my ever getting depressed or lost or moody. The truth is that I'm a simple guy, a grateful guy who loves what he's doing, and if I get moody once in a while, so what? I'm a character, not a 24-hour-a-day clown, a man, not a laugh machine, a tipper, not a tightwad.
"Matter of fact for a comedian I am surprisingly normal. I have never been to a psychiatrist and I've only been married once. A fellow could hardly be more normal than that."