A Radio Rogue

Buried amongst box ads for Sam Hearn as Horace Nimble on the Maxwell House Showboat and Benny Rubin on Sunday nights for Feen-a-Mint was this one-line squib in Weekly Variety of October 14, 1936:

Sid Chatton, CKMX announcer an[d] impersonator of voices of screen and radio players, has joined Don Lee network.

It piqued my interest because there couldn’t have been many impressionists on local Canadian radio at the time, and Chatton was among a string of people on Vancouver stations in the Golden Days of Radio to seek their fame on the other side of the border, including Arch Presby, Doug Gourlay, Fletcher Markle and the best-known of all, Alan Young. So I decided to dig a little further.

First, the story has the call letters wrong. A blurb in Weekly Variety of January 15, 1935 tells us: “Syd Chatton is a sports announcer for CKWX.”

Vancouver City Directories reveal Chatton was an usher at the Windsor Theatre (1931), a student employed at the Fraser Theatre (1932-33) and then an inspector for Empire Films Ltd. (1934-36).

“Joined the Don Lee network” means Chatton landed a job at KPO San Francisco. His impressions were good enough that Kay Jewelry of Oakland dumped its Kay Matinee show (handled by the University of California players) and sponsored him in a 15-minute programme called “Stars on Parade.” Billboard reviewed it on January 30, 1937. American network radio apparently called for higher standards of programming than what he was used to in local radio.

“Stars on Parade”
Reviewed Sunday, January 17, 4:15-4:30 p.m. Style—Talk. Sponsor—Kay Jewelry Company. Station—KPO and Coast NBC Red Network.
Except for the announcer (Grant Pollock) and the pianist who plays the theme, You Ought To Be in Pictures, this is a one-man show, but the man has many voices. He is Syd Chatton, 23-year-old imitator, late of the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
Idea of the show is the presentation of scenes from the current United Artist pictures, which Chatton doing a takeoff on the stars. This program was devoted to scenes from Charles Laughton’s Rembrandt, and all voices except female were Chatton’s. A novel note at the beginning was his simulation of the Coast’s well-known newscaster, Sam Hayes, to give the picture a plug. The announcer then gave a commercial and set the scene. Chatton did three scenes from the film, all with long Laughton speeches. Altho the lad’s imitation of the Laughton voice and vocal mannerisms were excellent, there was just too much. With no other known male star in the flicker, this could not be helped. A few lines of grade-A imitation is swell, but a quarter-hour makes the listener uncomfortable. More characters for Chatton to do would lend contrast and display a versatility which he had no chance to show on today’s offering.
Pollock read acceptable commercials in acceptable fashion, ending with the sponsor’s clever trade-mark, “It’s okeh to owe Kay.” P.K.

By April, Chatton has moved to Los Angeles where he appeared at the Paramount Theatre, was tested for films and picked up whatever radio work he could. Then he got a big break. By 1938, he was picked to fill a vacancy on a trio called the Radio Rogues, who had begun to appear on independent stations in the New York City area in late 1931. Here’s a story in the Brooklyn Eagle from December 5, 1939 where they wave the local flag, even though Chatton was from Vancouver.

BROOKLYN BOYS MAKE GOOD
By JANE CORBY
When somebody mentions the Radio Rogues, do you get a composite picture of Kate Smith, Adolf Hitler and Edward G. Robinson?
Me too.
The Radio Rogues, the great impersonators, are so darn well known as everybody else that I set out to track them down as just themselves—Eddie Bartell, Jimmy Hollywood and Sidney Chatton. big applause-getters of the much-applauded show “Hellzapoppin.” The best place to track down an actor—or three actors is in their dressing room just before a show. They’re bound to be there. They may elude you after the show, but not before. They may not want to be interviewed, but you sit in their dressing room where they've got to change within a few minutes and they will—if you're a feminine interviewer—talk. But fast. The show must go on and so must their costumes.
“Oops! Sorry.”
That was me, modestly backing out into the hall again after a glimpse of somebody in a costume that might have been a gym outfit and wasn’t. This sort of thing is bound to happen backstage at the Winter Garden, where the dressing room doors are always left open. Having backed into the hall and a passing actor, already in costume, including a brilliant tan like nothing that ever came out of Florida (oops! sorry, again), I was immediately recalled. One of the Rogues—it turned out to be Eddie Bartell—was now safe within a dressing gown; another, Jimmy Hollywood, was implacably in street attire; the third, Sid Chatton, was all ready for the first scene.
“Look,” I said, “which is which?”
“I sing,” said Eddie Bartell.
“I do the comedy,” said Jimmy Hollywood.
“I do dramatic stuff,” said Sid Chatton.
“Begin at the beginning,” I said. “You came from Brooklyn—where?”
“Flatbush,” said Eddie Bartell. “I went to Erasmus Hall.”
“I came from around DeKalb Ave.,” said Jimmy Hollywood. I went to school up the State Holy Cross.”
“I didn't come from Brooklyn,” said Sid Chatton, “I started in Canada.”
But he fixed that; he's a citizen now.
Why “Rogues”?

“When we started out on the radio we did impersonations, just as we do now,” said Jimmy. “We figured that what we were doing was stealing other people’s stuff, so we figured ‘Radio Rogues’ just about fitted us.” “We did impersonations on WLTH and other Brooklyn stations years ago,” said Eddie Bartell. “We did hill-billies and the Happiness Boys and Phil Cook and all the popular radio personalities.”
“We were,” said Jimmy Hollywood, “terrific.”
“We had an occasional spot on the air,” said Eddie Bartell. “One night we had to fill in for an act that could not appear. We decided to do imitations and the announced joined us. It happened that a booking agent heard us and overnight we turned professional, became the Radio Rogues.
“We’ve made a lot of picture, too,” said Jimmy Hollywood.
They’ve gone over big in pictures, continue to go over big on the radio and have been going over big in “Hellzapoppin,” a show which is in its second year and doing great. Have they any further ambitions?
“We want to buy a $1,500 fur coat,” said Sid Chatton, “we can take turned wearing it.”
The Rogues are all big Rogues—they’ll need a large coat. Eddie Bartell is the real athlete of the lot. He was the theatrical soft-ball star last year.
“The Hellzapoppin team played every show in town, in Central Park, wherever we could get a court. We played six shows and were undefeated.”
This year the soft-ball team is being reorganized and a hockey team too.
“This show’s a job for the next six months,” said Jimmy Hollywood. “Everybody figures, with their job safe, they might as well have some fun on their days off.”
The Radio Rogues were with “Hellzapoppin” before it became a Broadway show. It started as a half-hour vaudeville show, playing around the country six months before its hilarity brought it to Broadway.
But they were well used to success before the show came along. They had a “terrific time” in London in 1935, when they gave a request performance before King George V and the then Prince of Wales and Prince of York. Afterward they were entertained at Buckingham Palace.
Eddie Bartell’s career started far removed from the radio and theater. He was a salesman for a sporting goods house. Jimmy Hollywood was a Wall Street clerk and Sidney Chatton actually started in the theater, working with a brother of Johnson, of the "Hellzapoppin' " Olsen and Johnson, who present the show as well as act in it.
The pictures the Rogues have made including “Thanks a Million,” “Every Night at Eight” and “Going Hollywood.” They all like pictures. Sid wants to be a producer. He’s a walking encyclopedia of information on who played in what picture when.
All three Rogues live in California, Sidney Chatton in Hollywood, Jimmy Hollywood and Eddie Bartell in the San Fernando Valley, where many of the famous stars have homes, including Andy Devine and Louise Fazenda. Jimmy Hollywood has six children—three boys and three girls—and two of the youngsters, a boy and a girl, are already in pictures.

The Radio Rogues also supplied voices for cartoons, but voice historian Keith Scott points out this was around 1934-35 before Chatton was with them.

The Rogues ran (individually) for the board of directors of AGVA, the vaudeville performers association, in New York in 1940. One publicity story claimed Chatton and Bartell bought a chunk of land in the Yukon with the idea of mining for gold on it. But Chatton ended up leaving the Rogues by 1944 and performing on his own around the U.S. through the end of the decade.

Our friend Mr. Scott says Chatton did a pretty good Gable impression in Reveille With Beverly. His abilities on stage generally received good reviews in the trade papers for voices you might expect: Jack Benny, Don Wilson, Fred Allen (his routine was based on stars attending a Benny party, kind of like the plot of the Warners cartoon Malibu Beach Party), Peter Lorre, Herbert Marshall, Paul Muni, Walter Winchell, Ned Sparks, Katharine Hepburn, even a send-up of the Bogie-Bergman dialogue from Casablanca.

And what does a Radio Rogue do when radio dies? Go into television, of course. But Chatton wasn’t performing. He was the director of film operations for WCBS-TV until he resigned in August 1953 to go back into radio; he became the morning disc jockey at KFRC San Francisco. Chatton headed south to KFWB in 1956 and immediately cast in the Warner Bros’ movie Top Secret Affair, then landed associate production work at KTLA for six months before returning to San Francisco and KCBS. He moved to KTVU-TV in 1959 and was almost a jack of all trades. He anchored news and sports, was in charge of film programming and at the time of his death was anchoring a movie show. Variety of April 10, 1963 marvelled:

Syd Chatton of KTVU ( Channel 2) had a busy weekend in mid-March: From his “Pepito” show on Channel 2 he was seen in a KRON-TV 6 o'clock movie, then as a cop on a KP1X rerun of “San Francisco Beat,” then appeared live on KTVU again as staff announcer for a basketball telecast.

Chatton died of a coronary on October 6, 1966 at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley. His Variety obit, California state records and even his gravestone claim he was 48 at the time of death. He wasn’t. And if you’re wondering why his name was variously spelled “Syd” and “Sid,” there’s a reason for that. It wasn’t his name.

Show folk were known for shaving a few years off their ages; it’s a little more difficult today when elaborate government records are kept. Years ago, especially before World War Two, things were a little more laissez-faire. And Syd Chatton took the opportunity some time after leaving Canada for good that he’d erase five years from his age. The 1937 Billboard review has his correct age.

Albert Edward Chatton was born in Bolton, Lancashire, England on May 6, 1913. Canadian Passenger Lists available on the internet show young Mr. Chatton, age five weeks, and his mother Beatrice arrived in Quebec City by boat from England on his way to Vancouver on June 12, 1913. U.S. District Court Naturalizations records list both “Albert Edward” and “Syd” Chatton on the same declaration card dated January 25, 1937. Vancouver City Directories list him as both “Sid” and “Syd” so we can only presume it was a childhood nickname.

The one thing we haven’t mentioned about Chatton—he was in the cast of The Wonderful World of Wilbur Pope. It was a pilot for a TV series that never sold. Producer George Burns reworked it and recast it—Chatton was in San Francisco by that time—and it emerged as Mr. Ed, starring someone who was in Vancouver radio about the same time as Chatton, a chap named Alan Young.

P.S.: This post was more of an experiment than a semi-biography. When I started researching things decades ago, it meant parking yourself in a public library and transcribing what you found in microfilmed newspapers, magazines and census reports via pen-to-paper. The internet has changed all that. Granted, some newspaper (trade and otherwise) sites on-line are commercial, but if you can access them, there’s a wealth of information you can put together sitting at home on a computer. Such as this post.

Laughing Sylvester

Kind of a squat looking Sylvester, wouldn’t you say?



This is from “Hippety Hopper,” the second cartoon featuring the Sylvester, a “giant mouse” and a huge bulldog that keeps throwing Sylvester back in the house. Here are consecutive drawings (on twos) of Sylvester laughing and the theme “You Never Know Where You’re Going ‘Til You Get There.”



Pete Burness is in the Bob McKimson unit for this cartoon, along with Chuck McKimson, Izzy Ellis and Phil De Lara, and maybe some uncredited animators,

Dixieland Droopy Backgrounds

Tex Avery liked using familiar routines but he wasn’t wedded to the past. When he returned to MGM after some time off, he embraced stylised designs that were popular in animated commercials and at the UPA studio.

Here are some backgrounds by Joe Montell for “Dixieland Droopy,” released in 1954. No one would mistake this for Johnny Johnsen’s work for Avery only a few years before.



Joe gets himself in a background. At least, we can presume it’s his store to the right.



And here’s an inside reference. Walt Clinton animated on this cartoon. Observe the store in the background.



It isn’t only in terms of design where Avery’s trying something new. He’s also experimenting with sound. The perfection of the tape machine during the ‘40s enabled new ways for sound to be recorded and played back. It’s noticeable in “Billy Boy,” where Avery’s wolf finishes his sentences with looped reverb. In this cartoon, Avery tries experiments in sound when Droopy runs through various sizes of pipe while Dixieland music is playing, and again when he’s being chased through a hotel’s revolving front door.

The Fred Allen show’s John Brown provides a couple of voices here (he’s the hipster in “Symphony in Slang” as well), and you can hear Avery himself in addition to Bill Thompson as Droopy.

J-e-l-l....Well, You Know What It Is

Here’s a Sunday night “Benny Bonus” on the Tralfaz blog.



The picture is from the June 1936 edition of Radio Mirror. There was no article about Jack Benny or his cast in that edition. It was published just for the sake of it, I guess. The caption pretty much tells it all, other than the dish they’ve made is tempting and economical and comes in six delicious flavours (we hope this one doesn’t have the added flavour of pipe tobacco ash). So look for the big red letters on the box!

Incidentally, June 1936 marked Green’s last month on the Benny show. While Phil Harris may not have been Benny’s first choice as a replacement for Green, time proved him to be the best one.

What Makes Jack Benny Run

North American pop culture had begun to make a big shift by 1960. Rock and roll had arrived and was about to take a swing in a new direction with the Beatles. Television had put radio not only in the past, but the seeming distant past. The old vaudevillians were falling by the wayside. The humour of Cantor and Durante was giving way to stand-up styles of people as diverse as Bob Newhart, Phyllis Diller and Mort Sahl (not to mention Lennie Bruce).

So it was that in 1960, Jack Benny took the temperature of the comedy scene in an interview with the Chicago Tribune’s TV Times, published December 24th. Benny had long settled in to his comic routine and modified it only slightly over the ensuing years.

(We haven’t included the photos that accompanied the article because the copies that were scanned are barely visible).

WHAT MAKES JACK BENNY RUN?
By RICHARD BLAKESLEY
TV Week Editor
IN SHOW business where a 39 week contract is a life and death span for many entertainers, Jack Benny is heading into his 29th year, 11 of them on TV.
What is keeping this paradox of a most perilous profession from going the way of all TV flesh? How and why does he keep running on and on? It's not the money —he has plenty. It's not the love of the limelight—he's a retiring type, a better listener than talker, and not given to sounding off or parading.
Altho he was in Chicago during the Republican National convention in July, he refused to make an appearance as some of his contemporaries had done a few weeks earlier at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. He does not believe in identifying himself with any organization that might make him controversial.
The secret of his success is based on two program factors: A solid format in which he is always the lovable boob and the butt of most jokes, and loyal teamwork among those who have been on his show for years.
DON WILSON, for example, has been Benny's announcer for 27 years. Benny says he auditioned for announcers and signed Wilson because he laughed the loudest at the Benny brand of humor. Wilson is, of course, far more than announcer. Almost weekly he is placed in some outlandish situation.
One of Jack's early radio shows called for a young woman to crash his show and insist on reading him some of her poems. The character was written for one show only, but Mary Livingstone was such a hit she became a regular.
Rochester was another character created for one show, but his performance as the Pullman porter serving the Bennys on their trip to Hollywood was so popular with the audience that he has remained in the cast for 25 years.
Radio and TV combined, Benny has starred in more than 1,000 programs. While polls show that most viewers cannot tell offhand who sponsored what program, few have forgotten Benny's original trademark, "Jel—lo again!"
Thru the years Benny has built his programs around a self-portrait of miserliness and they have produced some classic laughs. Such as the night he was faced by a holdup man who demanded, "Money or your life! " To which Benny replied, after a pause, "I'm thinking——"
That long run theme of stinginess—Benny's ancient Maxwell, his vault surrounded by an alligator filled moat, the dollar that remains glued to his fingers, the semi-slavery under which he keeps Don Wilson, Dennis Day, and Rochester—defies all experts on comedy geriatrics.
FOR EVERY 30 minute program he broadcasts, Benny and his crew work five full days, starting with script reading sessions at which the director, producer, cast members, and associates join in a frank discussion of possible improvements—no matter how funny the script may seem.

These sessions are followed by the first of three rehearsals at the studio. There are no cue cards, no tele-prompters. All dialog must be fully memorized. The evening of the third rehearsal day an audience is admitted to the studio and the program is either filmed by three motion picture cameras operating simultaneously [the film is later edited and inter-cut] or it is videotaped. So strong is Jack's desire for perfection that even his so-called "live " programs are taped an hour or so before air time to avert any possibility of a slip.
This five day operation is preceded by prolonged labor by Jack's writers, two of whom have been with him 18 years and two 12 years. The oldsters are Sam Perrin and George Balzer; the youngsters, Hal Goldman and Al Gordon.
Benny is probably the greatest living example of pure American comedy. He is the only comedian, with the possible exception of Red Skelton, who can be funny by just looking and not saying a word. While a humorist comments on such matters as current events, politics, and day-to-day problems, and a standup comic tells jokes [Bob Hope qualifies in either category], Benny does neither, except occasionally in his brief opening monolog.
"Sick" comedians leave Benny cold. "I think most of their material is crude and in poor taste," he says.
"I don't like jokes that deal with people's troubles or scandal."
Benny is frankly concerned about the state of comedy and lack of proving ground for new comics. Vaudeville and musical comedy, which taught him pace and timing and gave him an opportunity to perfect his act in small towns before exposing it to metropolitan audiences, are no longer available to newcomer. And Jack is fully aware that the one thing essential in the development of a comedian is exposure.
JACK IS what can be called a comedy technician. He refuses to be a "gimmick" comedian because when the gimmick wears thin its user is in trouble. He is also convinced that, except for an occasional one-shot, the one man show cannot survive today. It had its day, he says, when radio was young and had such stars as Jack Pearl [Baron Munchausen] and Ed Wynn [the Fire Chief]. Benny's teamwork theory from the beginning was so advanced that his jump from radio to TV was no jump at all—his cast merely donned makeup and went thru the act as usual.
Benny has no hobbies, but he likes to play golf. "I like to ad lib a vacation," he says. "I like to throw my golf clubs in the back of the car and take off." He did just that last summer, driving across the country, spending 10 days in Chicago, most of it on the golf links. He did take time out, however, to pose in THE TRIBUNE'S studio where the picture, on today's TV Week cover was taken.
The Benny's live in Beverly Hills, Cal., in a house that he and Mary built more than 20 years ago. They have an adopted daughter, Joan, and two grandchildren.
"We live quite economically at home," he says. "Mary is an expert bargain hunter. If she discovered a good cheap toothbrush she'd buy 800 of them."

As the ‘60s rolled along, Benny and the other long-time comedians had to face the fact the world was changing and answer the question “How do I stay relevant to the new, younger audience?” Benny didn’t do a lot. He added guest stars to his shows who would appeal to a younger demographic. But, to me, there’s something about Jack Benny sharing the stage with the Smothers brothers that just doesn’t look right. Benny was among many veterans who popped up for a quick one-liner on “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.” Somehow, he and Dinah Shore and Orson Welles and Kate Smith just didn’t belong in the Mod, Mod World (I always wondered the appearances were due to being under NBC contract). But Benny still had a built-in audience, and even though it was older, that’s wisely who he tried to appeal to. He knew they wanted to laugh at the familiar old routines, that they were guaranteed to laugh at them, and that’s what he delivered. If young people laughed, all the better.

(As a side note, it seemed mandatory in the ‘60s for Benny, Durante, Berle, Hope and just about all the old comedians to do a routine on TV where they’d dress up in mod fashions. They weren’t so much satirizing the style of today, let alone embracing it. They were ridiculing it).

Jack Benny died in 1974, still tremendously loved and respected. Today, people can listen to his old radio shows and even though they depended on familiarity to some degree, audiences today will still laugh at what Benny and his gang put on the air. In the end, the changing cultural didn’t affect him a bit.

Sid Raymond's Other Cartoon

Cartoons populated television in ever-growing numbers through the 1950s, both in the form of ads and old theatricals that were rerun to death, but the Huckleberry Hound Show proved made-for-TV cartoons could be lucrative and critically popular. Pretty soon, some of those ad companies decided they should try their hands at cartoon programming.

Whether it was because of a glut on the market is open to debate but there have been a number of instances of cartoon shows announced around 1960 that never seem to have made it onto the air. One of them—at least I can’t find an indication any station ran it—is “Toy Box Time.”

The 1961 International Television Almanac revealed there were 26 half-hours of the programme being offered. It was the brainchild of Robert Lawrence Productions, a New York-based company which made TV commercials. Lawrence had several affiliates; there was a Canadian operation based in Toronto, and Grantray-Lawrence in Los Angeles seems to have done some subcontracting on various TV cartoon series and later drove itself into bankruptcy after producing the Spider-Man cartoons that ran on ABC in 1967.

But in 1960, the Lawrence company back east decided it wanted to produce an animated show, presumably for syndication. Various trade publications in July that year announced it. The earliest one I’ve found was in Weekly Variety and may be the most detailed. This was published on July 13th and fans of the Golden Age of Animation will recognise some of the names.

Kid Series On Lawrence Roster
Robert Lawrence Animation, tele-commercial firm, is making its first move into programming with a pilot for a half-hour animated kid series with "strong adult appeal." Titled "Toy Box Time," the series will be in color and feature four individual story segments in each stanza. Original story, design and direction are by Cliff Roberts and George Cannata of the Lawrence staff. Original music is being composed by Rufus Smith with animation by Grim Natwick. Leading roles will be voiced by Sid Raymond, John Astin and Barbara Louis. Latter two are featured in the cast of the long running off-Broadway production of "Threepenny Opera."

Sid Raymond was the voice of Katnip and Baby Huey, and eventually took over the role of the dopey Clifton Finnegan from Charlie Cantor on radio’s “Duffy’s Tavern.” Briefly in the '40s, he was also Heckle and Jeckle at Terrytoons. At the time he made “Toy Box Time,” he was touring in “Girl Crazy” with Harvey Lembeck and Al Lewis (I suspect they were probably funnier off stage than on). John Astin hadn’t broken out into television stardom yet; at this point, he was voicing commercials and doing theatre in New York. It appears this was Lawrence’s only New York-based foray into TV programming.

Another cartoon series that doesn’t appear to have made it onto screens was reported by Broadcasting magazine in its issue of August 10, 1959:

Heritage Productions, N.Y., has begun work on Bobo the Hobo, 78 five-minute color cartoons to be available as five -minute cliff- hangers or 15-minute shows. Heritage's new location is 730 Fifth Ave. Telephone: Judson 6 -6500.

The lineage of this one is a little unclear. A puppet series with the same name was produced (at $10,000 per 15-minute stanza) in 1952 by a company called Fantasy Features (Variety, Oct. 15, 1952). It starred the voice of Bret Morrison, better known as The Shadow on radio, and featured original songs by George Lessner. 26 episodes were made and passed through the hands of several different syndicators through the ‘50s. It was still in syndication when the cartoon series was proposed. Variety of August 5, 1959 reported Heritage had already finished making $210,000 worth of Bobo cartoons and a week later revealed Fremantle had sold them in Nigeria.

Heritage was run by a guy named Skip Steloff. He wasn’t an animator; he had a number of live-action syndicated sports shows (and was sued a couple of times in the ‘60s over payments he was accused of not making). Presumably, the cartoons were subcontracted out to an animation studio in New York. There’s no information about animators or voice actors in any of the stories.

If anyone has any additional information about these shows, leave a comment. I haven’t been able to find anything more.

This is Not Tex Avery

Paul Smith tries a Tex Avery-style eye-take in “Get Lost” when a dopey cat (Dal McKennon) sees a Marilyn Monroe calendar.



Gil Turner, Bob Bentley and Herman Cohen are the credited animators in this 1956 Walter Lantz cartoon.

The Disney Strike, 1925

“Alice’s Egg Plant” (1925) is interesting to watch with the hindsight of knowing the Walt Disney cartoon studio would be hit with a strike years later and Disney would blame it on Communists. That’s exactly what happens in this silent cartoon.

Here’s the dreaded Ruskie rooster planting a suitcase bomb under a railway track. I suppose that’s to set up his evilness because the cartoon never follows up on this as part of the plot. I guess the “A” that forms in his eyes stands for “Anarchist.”



Or maybe it stands for “Art Babbitt,” inciting a strike amongst the animators.



Rooster against rooster foreshadows animator against animator perhaps.



There are no animation credits on this short.

Fred Allen on the Ills of Radio

You might wonder if Fred Allen hated radio so much, hated its commercialism (for that matter, he disliked the non-commercial BBC), hated its management, even hated the very people who came to see him in the studio, why he bothered to stay in the business. Someone asked him that question and got an answer.

One could cynically suggest it was the hefty salary that Allen received, but material things never seemed to mean much to Allen. He lived quite modestly and regularly gave handouts to total strangers on the street. No, Allen gives the same answer I’ve heard from veteran radio people even today.

The Chicago Tribune syndicated this feature story on November 7, 1948. Allen was into his final radio season and the story focuses on Allen’s peeves about the radio industry, sans any of his bile aimed at game shows (though he refers to the ratings, where he was getting kicked by “Stop the Music”). So don’t expect any withering commentary on Hollywood in this go around.

The drawing accompanied the article.

FIFTEEN YEARS A RADIO FUN-MASTER
By LARRY WOLTERS

BREAKFAST Is just a little bit more trying to Portland Hoffa than to the average housewife. Fred Allen, her husband, instead of reading one paper while grappling with the grapefruit, tussles with nine. Moreover, he flourishes a razor blade attached to a long handle at frequent intervals. These slashings, with luck, may later yield an idea for a question.
Meanwhile, Allen's writers—he maintains from three to five—are snipping papers elsewhere around Manhattan, In due time they meet Allen and everyone fishes these scraps of paper out of his pockets. Shortly, the place looks like a confetti factory. Sometimes these sessions, long arduous, may result on a subsequent Sunday in a bit of topical satire or some wry comment on the manners and morals of the times.
If so, Allen will have to do a lot of work before the finished product reaches the air. The best his writers do is to spark-plug him. He writes volumniously between lines of any copy turned out by his writers.
After sweating out his script, Allen regularly throws much of it away during rehearsal, as he thinks up better lines or substitutes comment still more acrid when he gets on the air.
* * *
He has been on the air fifteen years now (he took one year off) and he's still at the top. John Steinbeck proclaimed him "the best humorist of our time."
Edgar Bergen, no minor comic himself, says "Allen is the greatest living comedian." Whatever else he may be, he's the best ad libber of our time.
In his asides Allen maintains that the outlook for radio, particularly for a radio comedian (and for that matter the whole human race) is dark. If Allen derives any comfort or cheer from leading the radio parade he gives no glimmer of it in private conversation.
"Why do you continue in radio?" I asked him when we last met.
"Because I'm 63 years old and don't know what else to do," he replied. "I couldn't stand traipsing around the country any more, sleeping in bad hotels. I can earn a living in radio, so I stick with it."
Reminiscing about his days in vaudeville And on the legitimate stage, Allen got around to a credible explanation of why he avoids capital letters on his typewriter. Fred doesn't like suggestions that he copied from e. e. cummings.
"It happened in Chicago back in 1927," Fred recalled. "A bellhop dropped my Corona—and thereafter it worked only in lower case. I never bothered to have it fixed."
* * *
Progress in radio?
"I've survived three presidents and countless sets of vice presidents," says Allen, "and the only improvement I've noticed around Radio City is that the lights have been dimmed in the elevators so that the operators can't read Racing Form while working." And even that might not have been necessary."
"A good many of them already had astigmatism," Allen explained.
"The greatest trouble with entertainment as it exists today," says Allen, "is the fact that no one involved in it is really interested in the creative side of it. The network wants to sell the time, the advertising agency wants to keep the client pacified, and the client wants to sell the soap. So, in and around the unholy three the writers and the actors run in bewildered circles. Their fates are hinged on the Hooper, a mythical decimal record that comes out once a month (God knows where)."
Allen can be optimistic about American radio only when he thinks of the BBC.
"If you heard some of the English radio programs you'd be very happy to take our programs as they are. . . . They start off in the morning when a taxidermist goes on telling you how to stuff a field mouse or something, for three hours. That goes on, more or less, all during the day."
* * *
Allen's acidosis has been considerably aggravated by censorship, which in his view frequently has been tied up with vice presidents and to a lesser degree with sponsors and their agencies.
"A vice president," according to a considered Allen definition, "is a man who doesn't know precisely what his job is and by the time he finds out he no longer is with the organization."
Allen was cut off the air at the instance of a vice president who didn't like something the comedian said about the V. P. in charge of programs. That vice president subsequently did find himself out of a job after various comedians had rallied to the defense of Allen and made the network look pretty silly. "The performer and the agency producing a show should be the arbiters of taste," Allen holds. "In the long run it simply doesn't pay a comedian to offend the public. I wouldn't offend a single person, I don't think, If let alone and yet I've been pictured as a sort of ogre—the Dean of Bad Taste."
* * *
Allen asserts that radio dominated by business men instead of by people who know the show and entertainment business. This is a matter of exceeding regret to him.
"I think if I went in to Mr. Charles Luckman," Allen said recently (he's not Allen's sponsor), "and showed him how to make soap, he'd resent it. He knows what goes on in the vat there, I don't knew anything about that. By that same token I don't think he should come and tell me how to write jokes."
Allen's estimate of the advertising agency account man is not high either, when it comes to his function with reference to radio.
"An account executive," he once explained, "is a man with a crew cut who lives in Connecticut. He gets to the office at 10 a. m. and finds a mole hill on his desk. He has until 4 p.m. to make, a mountain out of it."
One of the greatest obstacles confronting a radio comedian, says Allen, is that "negative flotsam," the studio audience.
"Where they come from; where they go, nobody-knows," Allen lamented. "You can work in front of a studio audience and learn precisely nothing. The same people show up week after week, year after year, nobody cares."
On another occasion Allen observed: "The radio program should be, written to appeal to people in their homes. You go into a studio, you have two or three hundred people in your audience, and their reaction decides how your program is being received. A great many people at home say: 'How was the program? Well, the studio audience didn't laugh.' They enjoy it by remote control or something. It's the old Greek drama—a fellow runs in and tells you something exciting has happened in the street, and all you see is a winded man.
"The radio, as an instrument, is in your home the same as a phonograf. And, consequently, I think your entertainment should come out of it, geared to the size of your room, not with three or four hundred people whistling and hollering and yelling and throwing pies at each other."
* * *
On the question of an editorial policy for broadcasters Allen is on record; 'Mr. Niles Trammell, the president of NBC, made a speech before the Federal Communications commission (on the Mayflower decision banning radio editorials) and he was so impressed by what he heard as he was speaking, he published his talk in a little brochure, which I read, and it's very interesting. Mr. Trammell feels that stations should have the right to an editorial policy. Personally, I don't agree with him on this issue, among other things.
"Radio City is to me a big phone booth. You go in there and you pay and you say what you have to say and you hang up and come out. And I think that thru the various discussions and round tables that both sides of almost every question are heard by the people who are interested in hearing them."
On the matter of platter chatter, now flooding the air, Allen has been mercifully brief: "All you need to be a disk jockey is to be able to stay awake, have a needle and a record."
And with the whole broadcasting industry whooping it up for video, Allen cautions: "There are millions of people in New York who don't even know what television is. They are not old enough to go into saloons.
"Today television is just like when radio started with crystal sets. People used to stay up all night and brag that they heard Pittsburgh, and look what's happened to radio. Or don't look what's happened to radio!"
* * *
Such is Allen's attitude toward the medium he works in. He is amiable enough personally. His friends are ordinary folks, mostly, in lowly walks of life. He's the easiest touch in Manhattan. He used to answer all letters personally. Nowadays he gets hundreds, but he still pecks out replies to many every week. He's had to have an unlisted phone number for years, so he can get some work done.
When last in New York I called his old phone, but found that it had been changed. (The guy who had been assigned his former number wanted to talk about all the experiences he had had with people trying to call Allen.) Allen's associates wouldn't give out his new number. I wired him and asked whether we could meet for a brief chat.
He phoned several times, I learned on returning to my hotel, but wouldn't leave a number. Finally came one more call: "Where have you been?" he growled. "I've been sitting in this phone booth all afternoon calling you every five minutes."
Well, he came over and we talked for a half hour. Then he suggested going out for a bite. We sought out what we thought would be a secluded place. No sooner were we seated when a hefty chap rushed up and grabbed Allen's hand: "Why, Fred, I haven't seen you since the Chicago fair." Allen, thinking the fellow was perhaps an acquaintance of mine, listened to his story of the 14 intervening years. Finally the fellow finished.
After he had gone Fred scanned the menu, ordered the vegetable plate and said: 'I wasn't at the Chicago fair!"

Daffy Duck Smears

Some smear animation from “My Favorite Duck,” a 1942 Chuck Jones cartoon. These are consecutive frames.



And from earlier in the cartoon.