More Bad Luck

Another gag from Tex Avery’s great Bad Luck Blackie. You know the premise—black cat crosses the dog’s path. Dog gets hurt.

Here’s the telephone pole gag. The kitten races up the pole from the last gag. Nice layout here. And notice how Johnny Johnsen varies the colours on the wood slats on the fence. And there are shadows, too. Lots of attention to detail that you’d expect in a 1940s MGM cartoon.



As soon as the cat reaches the top of the pole, the wires on the left start to move slightly. The cat notices. Pan to the left.



The kitten blows the whistle. How are Avery and gag man Rich Hogan going to get the cat up there to cross the dog’s path? They find a way. I like how the cat is showing how casual it is about the whole thing by having its eyes closed.



The dog gets ready to grab the kitten. Failure. Avery cuts to a close-up for the explosion. Note the sense of balance on the dog.



Just so the last scene isn’t static, Avery has the burned head outline around the dog vibrate a little bit.

Louie Schmitt, Preston Blair, Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons animated the cartoon; Schmitt designed the characters.

The Life and Times of Jack Benny, Part 1 of 6

The life story of Jack Benny was published in many newspapers and magazines over the years, but perhaps the most extensive version was in the New York Post. The paper printed a six-part biography on full pages on consecutive days, beginning on February 3, 1958. We’re going to bring you the whole story over the next six Sundays, so ignore the references to “Tomorrow...”.

Unfortunately, the photo which accompanied each story is unviewable in on-line photocopies of the Post, so we’ve had to make substitutions.

The Jack Benny Story
By DAVID GELMAN and MARCY ELIAS
ARTICLE I
In the course of a radio show about 10 years ago, Jack Benny read a gag-line to the effect that if he couldn't take it with him he wouldn't go.
Not only was this the pithiest of the several thousand or so jokes that have been dedicated over the years to Benny's penuriousness; it also contained an accurate prophecy.
After a quarter century of continuous success in a career that bridges the infancy of radio and the adolescence of television, Benny still gives no indication of going. And the truth is, with the possible exception of a disgruntled critic or two, nobody really wants him to go.
In an era of incredibly swift change and the daily obsolescence of familiar things, it's nice to be able to turn to Jack Benny for a sense of permanence. One of the few untarnished tokens remaining to us from the dear, dead depression days of the 30s, he is everybody's favorite anachronism.
Indeed, as the most popular object of mass derision in the modern history of show business, as the man everybody loves to insult, as the man who is everyone's inferior, he continues to be held in affectionate contempt by millions upon millions of TV viewers. Rating-wise, he is as big today as he was in the heyday of his radio triumphs.
In the face of such latter-day competitors as the adult Westerns, Benny remains the one indestructible feature of Sunday night television
The Buildup
From one point of view he is really the best straight man in the business. He has also been called a superb editor of comedy material (that is, for his own peculiar needs) and a master of timing.
The late Fred Allen once observed, in the spirit of the fictitious Benny-Allen feud that enlivened radio in the late 30s and early 40s, that "there are two kinds of jokes—funny jokes and Jack Benny jokes."
As a matter of fact Jack Benny jokes are usually not jokes at all. They are little character references whose humor depends on one's familiarity with the character referred to.
On a Benny broadcast about 11 years ago (the time-scale in a discussion of the Benny show is always a little unsettling) Benny mentioned the name of his orchestra leader, Phil Harris.
"Please," said guest star Benita Column, "not while I'm eating."
This rather commonplace insult drew one of the longest studio audience laughs in the show's history. As Benny later pointed out to an interviewer it took approximately 10 years of script references to Phil Harris' intemperance, his crudity and his ignorance to build that epoch-making laugh.
The Benny show has always built patiently toward the future. Where other comics were satisfied with the rapid fire topical gag, the joke for a day, Benny invested in the long-term endowment plan.
"Gags die, humor doesn't," he observed once. At the same time his definition of humor, or comedy, is that it is "merely something that makes people laugh. That's all. It makes no difference how."
While this would seem to include pie-throwing, pratt-falls, funny hats and worse, he has always remained within the bounds of good taste, assuming to begin with that one finds the humor of round-robin insults tasteful. The Benny show rarely employs lines that are pointedly funny but It does create an atmosphere of good humor in which almost everything is somehow (and often mysteriously) funny: old jokes, new jokes, bad jokes, good Jokes and even no jokes long silent pauses.
(It's been said that originally this infectious spirit was created almost single-handedly by Frank Remley, a guitar player in the orchestra and close personal friend of Benny, who laughed it up raucously after every comedy line, usually a couple of seconds ahead of the studio audience.)
In any case one of the secrets of Benny's charm would appear to be, as Portland Allen recently put it, "just the kind of fun that he gets out of the material."
Fun is what Benny provides and fun is what he seems to live for. Dating back to his earliest days in vaudeville, he has always surrounded himself with a circle of wisecracking cronies who stuck together for laughs and he is even said to have married Mary Livingston for her sense of humor.
Jack may command the salary of a high priest of humor but he behaves like one of its acolytes. In his own spacious Beverly Hills living room he is a slavish audience for some of the most celebrated comedians of the age.
"I would rather work Jack Benny's living room than the London Palladium," Danny Kaye once said.
The reason is fairly obvious. Benny is an alarmingly physical laugher who falls out of his chair, pounds the carpet, chokes, drools and claws the air when he is amused, a response he provides so often that no one even bothers to help him up off the floor. The man who can unseat him more often than anyone else is George Burns. Between the two friends there is such an uncanny rapport that Burns sometimes has to do nothing more than look at Benny is reduce him to helpless, writhing laughter. Burns exercises this power whenever the spirit moves him, usually on the average of once a day.
‘Hey, Jack’

A few years ago, Burns showed Benny an invitation he had received to a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall. When Benny wondered why he hadn't received one too, Burns told him it was just as well "because all I'd have to do is look at you and you'd laugh like an idiot and break up the whole program."
On the day of the concert Benny got an invitation. He went to Carnegie Hall and made sure he was seated at a safe distance from Burns. A moment after the concert began with a quiet Chopin Prelude, Benny heard someone whisper hoarsely, "Hey, Jack."
He turned around carefully and found himself face to face with Burns, who had managed to move into the seat directly behind him. Burns wriggled his eyebrows a little and there was a sudden stir in the audience as Jack fell out of his seat choking with suppressed laughter. As soon as the opening Prelude was finished, Benny fled the concert hall.
Another man with the power is Harry Ritz, the one in the middle of the Ritz Bros. The reflexive relation between Ritz and Benny runs like this: they encounter one another at a party; Ritz stares at Benny with goggle-eyed menace; Benny says, "Talk to me"; Ritz immediately begins hurling at him all the insults he can summon up; Benny collapses in a seizure of giggles.
"Off-stage," says Burns, "Jack never tries to be funny because he's always busy laughing at everybody else. He makes everybody feel they're the world's greatest comedians. They aren't. He is."
If this is the over-statement of a devoted friend, the fact remains Benny is a rare phenomenon among comedians—that is, a performer without ego. And without the essential bitterness that lies at the heart of wit. As far as he is concerned, it is better to give laughter than to receive for one's self.
Nothing displeases him more than a disservice to entertainment. He may be the world's easiest audience but when he sees a bad performer It infuriates him. Once, after sitting stonily through an inept performance by a young nightclub comic in Chicago, he turned to the others at his, table and said through clenched teeth:
"He was so bad I could kill him."
$$$$$$
If the mythical Benny is an extreme caricature of greed and self-infatuation, Benny the man is by all odds the most unassailable personality in the entertainment profession. When he threw a $25,000 wedding party for his daughter Joan in March of 1954 it produced the most glittering turnout of stars in Hollywood history—testimony, perhaps, to the extraordinary affection in which he is held by other performers.
Except for an intensely painstaking preoccupation with his show, he takes an easy pleasure in people and things that makes no excessive demands on them.
Certainly not a negative quality is his bland, almost absent-minded open-handedness with money. Over the years his staff of writers has been the best paid in the business, as were the members of his cast, many of whom, like tenors Frank Parker, Kenny Baker and Dennis Day, went on to independent successes from the sturdy springboard of the Benny show.
His comic sidekick, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson" is today the master of a block-long estate, three servants, two cars, a yacht and a racing stable—a monument to well-being that rivals Benny's own. Anderson understandably feels Benny is more a father-image than a boss to him.
From the Friars Club, in New York to the Hillcrest Country Club in Beverly Hills, the man has virtually never made an enemy or committed a memorable offense against his colleagues, which makes him in a way an unusual subject for portrait. In what amounted to a challenge, Benny said to a Post reporter the other day:
"Everybody you meet tell you I was a nice guy? Nobody tell you I was a louse? Well If you can get a series of articles out of my life, that will be the marvel of all time."
But Benny himself is something of a marvel, of course. From the most inauspicious beginnings, and with a talent that overwhelms neither eye nor ear, he rose to the rare status of an entertainment institution.
TOMORROW: The Waukegan Prodigy.

Cartoon Composer Scott Bradley

When the MGM cartoon studio closed in 1957, not all the employees followed producers Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera to their brand-new animation operation. Maybe the most notable of these was musical director Scott Bradley.

Bradley was 65 when Metro shut down and he decided that was a good enough time to call it a career. After all, he had been in music for at least 45 years at that point.

Comparisons between Bradley and his counterpart at Warner Bros. (Schlesinger), Carl Stalling, are inevitable. Both used snippets of popular or public domain songs, sometimes as visual puns (for example, Tom and/or Jerry strolling into a kitchen might be accompanied by “Sing Before Breakfast”). But no one will ever mistake one composer for the other. Stalling never struck me as pretentious. I’m not so sure I can say the same thing about Bradley.

Shawn Roney, in his thesis A Frog, A Cat, A Mouse, A “Deranged Genius” and More: The Story of MGM Cartoons (1998), quoted his interview with Hanna:

I worked close with Scott Bradley because I did all of the timing of the Tom and Jerrys and did a lot of my work on bar sheets, where the actual notes were written down. . . . And he was always very cooperative and — in working closely with him — why, we could almost tell him exactly, or I could tell him exactly, what we had in mind and we wanted and he always seemed to be able to fulfill that. ...
We worked with Scott on a daily basis. He was [a] much older man than we were; and as far [as] having any social life together, we didn’t. But he was certainly a pleasure to work with and a great talent and a lot of fun.

Bradley was born Walter Scott Bradley on November 26, 1891 in Russellville, Arkansas (“but [I am] not an "Arkie" I hasten to add,” he told musicologist and composer Ingolf Dahl in 1949). His father Horace was a judge who moved the family to Wewoka, Indian Territory in 1897. It was a frontier town. In 1902, a crazed woman showed up on the Bradleys’ doorstep threatening to cut off the judge’s head with a knife. Mrs. Bradley took three shots at the woman at close range and missed. When Horace died on a trip to Texas in 1907, a collect telegram was sent to a brother informing him of the death. The charges were refused.

Bradley started making a living playing the piano. The vaudeville newspaper, the New York Clipper, has this entry on February 8, 1913:

PITTSBERG, Kan., Note.—The Deloys (Dainty Dudines) Tabloid Musical Comedy Co., the oldest tabloid company in the middle West, has closed seventeen weeks at the Empress Theatre, Grand Island, Neb., and are playing a stock engagement at the Electric Theatre, Pittsburg, Kan., with Joplin, Mo., to follow. The company, under the direction of Eddie Deloy, is featuring Myrtle Deloy, the ragtime singer, and is contemplating a trip through the Black Hills. Wyoming and Montana, this season. The people with the company are: W. Scott Bradley, musical director; Tolla Deloy, Ray Leslie, Geo. Bierig, Ruby Darby, Hazel Balford, Effie Girtrude, Patsy Jones, Myrtle Deloy and Eddie Deloy.

In September 1916, he was playing piano in Lloyd C. Finlay’s orchestra at the Majestic and Rice theatres in Houston and pounding the organ at the Majestic in 1924. For a time in 1919, he led a six-piece band at the Rialto in Tulsa. It’s interesting to note on one of the bills in Houston was an Aesop Fables cartoon. Bradley could very well have accompanied the silent cartoon with organ music. Bradley told told Dahl he “studied piano, private instruction, organ and harmony with the English organist Horton Corbett,” who was based in Houston.

Music historian Daniel Goldmark reveals in his thesis Happy Harmonies: Music and the Hollywood Animated Cartoon (2001) that Bradley moved to Los Angeles in 1926. City directories of the late ‘20s only list him as a musician, but not where. However, in June 1929 he was hired by KTM radio as its music director and instituted a weekly, hour-long light-opera spot, including vocalists. He left the following January. By May 1930, he was at KNX, and by September he had moved over to KHJ, where he lasted about four months as assistant orchestra leader. (Trade paper Inside Facts of Stage and Screen, Sept. 6, 1930, claimed Bradley had trained under Victor Herbert).

When did he start in cartoons? Roy Prendergast wrote in Film Music: A Neglected Art (1977) that Bradley played "piano in the then tiny Walt Disney Studios. . . Bradley worked for Disney during that short period when 'actual' recording, or recording without benefit of post-production dubbing, was still in use." Goldmark found there was no record of Bradley at Disney, but as you can see above there are gaps in Bradley’s radio career and it could be he worked for Walt then. However, Goldmark discovered 13 ASCAP cue sheets for Ub Iwerks cartoons from 1931 and 1932 with Bradley’s name on them, so he was definitely in animation by then.

How did he end up at MGM in 1934? Bradley told Mike Barrier and Milt Gray in a 1977 interview that Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising

had a picture they wanted to do at Paramount Studios, and they were looking for someone to do the music. Frank Marsales was working for Rudy and Hugh, but his hand was injured. . . . I was at home and not working at the time, and they called me. I had never met them nor they met me. . . . I knew they were working with a small budget, so instead of charging them $500.00 for the job, I gave them the music for $250.00.

So it was that when Harman and Ising won a distribution deal from MGM in 1934, Bradley composed scores for all their cartoons until shorts department head Fred Quimby dropped the Harman-Ising studio and set up his own on the Metro lot in 1937. Ex Disney musician Bert Lewis won the job as the composer but when Harman and Ising were brought in as staff directors the following year, they made it a condition of employment that Bradley be hired, too. According to Goldmark, MGM dropped Bradley as a contract employee in 1954 and employed him on a freelance basis at just under $1,000 a cartoon through 1957 when the studio closed.

What was Bradley doing when he wasn’t employed on cartoons? In 1933, we find him as the pianist at the Church of the Kingdom on South Figueroa Street. In March 1934, Bradley’s cantata “Thanatopsis” for orchestra and chorus opened the season of the Los Angeles Oratorio Society. Bradley also composed the orchestral suite “Cartoonia,” which told the fairy story a little girl had fabricated for her doll, as well as “Valley of the Poppies,” both which were performed by 1938. He was also honoured in 1941 as one of the first 29 recipients of the National Federation of Music’s awards for advancing the quality of screen music (Carl Stalling won nothing).

We’ve read about Bradley’s relationship with Bill Hanna. Working with Tex Avery, the director of the other MGM cartoon unit, was different. Tex wasn’t subtle. His takes were obvious and so was his music; familiar old song titles were preferable because the audience would be guaranteed to catch the humour or irony in their use. Bradley told Barrier

Tex Avery didn’t like my music. We disagreed a lot on what kind of music was appropriate for his cartoons. His ideas on music were so bad that I had to put a stop to it. In every picture he wanted ‘Home Sweet Home’ and all that corny music.

But about one of Avery’s shorts, Bradley said in 1948

In a recent cartoon, Out-Foxed, I wrote a short four-voiced fugue on ‘3 [British] Grenadiers’ with the little tune ‘Jonny’s Got a Nickel’ serving merrily as the counter subject. Cartoons usually do without fugue, but here it fits the action. Musically spoken, you can get away with almost anything in pictures if the score only captures the ‘feeling’ of the sequence.

Indeed, John H. Winge wrote in the Fall 1948 edition of Sight and Sound, after sniffing at the “hackneyed foxtrots” and “fusillades of the sound effects boys” at unidentified animation studios, that

MGM’s Tom and Jerry series and its cartoons by Tex Avery seem to have high musical ambitions.

Bradley was versatile and comfortable with different types of music. Consider the vibrant New Orleans wails of Dixieland Droopy, the jazzy, bass-lined “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby” of Solid Serenade, the melodic urban theme “Manhattan Serenade” in “Mouse in Manhattan” and Franz Liszt’s classical “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” in “The Cat Concerto.” But he seems to have preferred what was considered modern (non-popular) music. Winge stated that “Bradley prefers his unorthodox harmonizations of known little melodies which turn into hilarious sound when synchronized with the proper cartoon action.”

While Stalling had the full Warner Bros. orchestra at his disposal, Bradley was limited to 19 or 20 pieces. Winge explained:

Bradley had to re-consider it as a large chamber group: he treated the wood-winds individually, the strings as a quintet and the piano as a solo instrument instead of as a filler. But this approach demanded multiple counterpoint and unconventional harmonic devices. The kind of fast a-rhythmic stories used in cartoons did not lend itself to a steady rhythmic pattern or to long-winded melodic lines. Bradley senses here a strong affinity between the structure of the cartoon and modern music. All this led him away from the beaten path. First, he used Stravinsky’s well-known Petrouchka chord as a shock denoting Jerry Mouse’s horrified gasp. This harmonic innovation ranks—in Bradley’s words—with Wagner’s harmonization of the chromatic scale in Die Walkuere. Rimsky-Korsakoff used the basic progression as a modulation, i.e., C-major to F-major, but Stravinsky combined the two, sounding them simultaneously in various inversions in close and open harmony. This device is the basis of most contemporary harmony, save Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone System. For years, Bradley has been using it, too, as probably the only composer in his field. “The Twelve-Tone System,” he says “provides the ‘out-of-this-world’ progressions so necessary to under-write the fantastic and incredible situations which present-day cartoons contain.”

For an analytic appraisal of Bradley’s cartoon work, you can do no better than to read Chapter 2 of Goldmark’s Tunes for ’Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (2005). Suffice it to say, to my layman’s ears, Bradley’s scores suited what was on the screen and provided some laughs on their own. That’s the only thing that really matters.

Bradley died April 27, 1977 at his home in Chatsworth, California at the age of 85. He was buried by his brothers of Silver Trowel Masonic Lodge No. 415.

Flipping For Flip

Poverty-stricken Flip and a young friend escape from a cop into someone’s apartment suite in What a Life (1932). They find food and musical instruments. Their playing attracts one of those long-legged women you find in Ub Iwerks cartoons.



More of Iwerks’ radiating lines.



The woman saunters over to Flip and shows an interest in more than his musicology.



Her husband comes home. It’s the cop!



The woman has Flip and the kid hide in the closet, but the cop/husband is wise. “Come outta there or I’ll shoot,” he growls. The gag? It’s not Flip and the kid. And it would appear the woman doesn’t discriminate racial when it comes to her men of interest (Flip, on the other hand, shows a decided delectation in female felines even though he’s supposed to be a frog).



The title card says the cartoon was drawn by Ub Iwerks. We suspect some other animators had their hand in this.

The Old Paint-a-Tunnel Gag

If the gag works for Chuck Jones and the Roadrunner, it’ll work for Mike Lah and Droopy, right?

In Mutts About Racing (1958), Spike tries getting the edge on Droopy in a car race by painting a tunnel against the side of a mountain. You know the gag. The difference is, other than you can barely see what’s happening thanks to the huge CinemaScope screen, is that Spike’s car breaks up into little pieces, then Spike does the same. The cracking-up-into-pieces bit is an old Tex Avery gag; in fact, Avery used the paint gag in one of his Droopy/Spike competitions.

Ed Benedict laid out the scenes in this cartoon and Fernando Montealegre painted the backgrounds. By the time this cartoon was in theatres, the two were making TV cartoons at Hanna-Barbera with stylised backgrounds toned down from what you see here. The MGM studio was winding down when this cartoon was made as even Dick Bickenbach, normally the layout man in the Hanna-Barbera unit, did some animation on this short. Irv Spence is credited, but he had left MGM in August 1956 for a job at commercial house Animation, Inc.

At Home With Bob and Ray

Timing can be crucial if you’re a publisher of puffery.

A fan magazine can invent a lovey-dovey story about your favourite couple, only to see it evaporate when they split up before the presses can get it into newsstands. We’ve posted a story about Jack Benny’s great relationship with writer Harry Conn which not only didn’t exist, the two engaged in a I-quit-no-you’re-fired routine soon after it was published. We’ve also put up a piece about Bill Cullen and his wife who would soon divorce.

And then there’s this story about the home lives of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding. It has a cover date of March 1953. That’s the same year Elliott divorced the wife you see in the photos below. He’s quoted in Dave Pollock’s book Bob and Ray, Keener Than Most Persons that his marriage “was grinding to an end” even as Radio-TV Mirror printed this feature article. The photos below accompanied the story.

BOB and RAY — SPICE OF OUR LIFE
By CHRIS KANE

ONE IS slight and blonde. (That's Bob Elliott.) The other's larger, darker, with an upper lip where his moustache used to be. (That's Ray Goulding.)
Instead of two minds with a single thought, they have half a mind between them. At least that's the impression they try to give.
"Bob's good on the ukulele," Ray says.
"Ray's good on the elevator," Bob says.
They came from Boston—full of beans, naturally—to take over NBC, which still hasn't recovered from the shock. The boys often introduce their show by announcing simply: "Bob and Ray take great pleasure in presenting the National Broadcasting Company."
Before they presented the National Broadcasting Company, with its glorious network facilities, they labored on a local show where they depicted the activities of Mary Backstage, Noble Wife. Mary was a girl from a deserted mining town out west who came to the big city to find happiness as the wife of Handsome Harry Backstage, idol of a million other women. Something like that, anyhow. All the characters were played by Bob and Ray—the scripts completely ad-libbed as they went along.
The boys are still satirizing anything and everything—but that ain't all. They'll even make fun of themselves. Ray claims he has a Shetland pony, Bob claims he designs his own socks.
"I own the Empire State Building," Ray goes on. "When my friends see me coming, they say, 'Here's old Money-Bags!'" "I get horse-hives," Bob mutters. "I look at a horse, and my nose runs."
"Bob was voted Most Likely To Succeed," Ray cries.
"Ray was voted Most Likely To," Bob parries.



Ask them to tell you a few simple facts about themselves, never mind the clowning, and they look pained. "Nothing to tell," they say. Then Ray's phone rings. "Joe's on the phone," says somebody. "My brother Joe?" says Ray. Then he turns to the interviewer with a simple fact. "I have a brother Joe."
Besides a brother Joe, he's got a wife and three children. He met his wife Liz (née Mary Elizabeth Leader, of Springfield, Ohio) in the Army. It sounds like a joke, but isn't. She was a dietitian, he was an instructor at the Officers Candidate School in Fort Knox, Kentucky.
"We got married on a three-day pass," Ray says. "At a little spa in Indiana. A sweet little church around the corner —around the corner from an arsenal."
As he warms to his story, he embroiders, "General Patton was riding down the street outside crying, 'Blood and Guts!'" "Their song," butts in Bob, "is 'Stars and Stripes Forever.'"

Ray hangs his head. "Every time we hear 'Reveille,' we look at each other tenderly—"
Ray and Liz were married in '45, came to Boston in 1946, after Ray's discharge from the Army. He'd been a radio announcer in Lowell, Massachusetts (where he was born and raised), after he got out of high school, so it was logical that he'd go back to being a radio announcer. He ended up at Station WHDH in Boston, where, by a laughable coincidence, one Bob Elliott was also announcing. More properly, Bob Elliott was disc-jockeying.
Bob was a Boston boy who'd had a fling at New York. Went to acting school there, and got a job at NBC. He was a genuine NBC page boy. Escorted studio visitors to their seats. As a lifework, this left something to be desired, so 1941 found the pride of Boston back home at WHDH.
In 1943, Bob married Jane Underwood, who was on the air for WHDH, too. Ask Bob what Jane did on the air, and he says vaguely, "Oh, women's stuff—"
From 1943 to 1946, Bob spent in the Infantry.
In 1946, he met his other half—professionally speaking. As we said, Bob was disc-jockeying over WHDH. This Ray Goulding used to come in and read the newscasts. After the news they'd kid around a little, and soon proper Bostonians were howling improperly at the wit and jollity and fun and games.
New York was their next stop.

Bob and Jane now live in a three-room-and-terrace apartment in the East Sixties. They have two cats—live—and one sailfish—stuffed—over the mantel. That is, the fish is over the mantel, the, cats are not. Speaking of cats—to which Ray, by the way, is allergic—Bob and these animals are on positively intimate terms. Bob once broke his leg, went to bed with the cast on it, and woke up the next morning to find that a lady cat had had kittens all over his splints.
His sailfish, while not as imaginative as his cats, has an interesting history, too. Bob was in Miami last summer, had never been sailfishing before, engaged in mortal combat with this monster fish, brought it all the way home to New York to gape over the fireplace, and now decries the whole affair. "That?" he says. "Oh, I just happened to go fishing—"
The Elliotts, though comfortably settled in New York, still hang on to their house and Ray—Spice of Our Life in Boston—or, rather, Cohasset. Bob literally hangs on, weekends. He goes up and shingles the place, though it looks as though he's going to be much too busy ever to spend much time in it any more.
Ray and Liz and their kids live in a rented house in Harbor Acres, which is out on Long Island, near Port Washington. Raymond, Jr., is seven, Tommy's going on four, and the baby, Barbara, is a year-and-a-half old.

All are healthy, good-natured types and, besides health, Raymond's got ingenuity. Father Ray's been buying handsome tools for a long time—a good shovel, a stout hammer—and one by one they disappear.
He suspects Raymond of swapping them for Buck Rogers guns and atomic chemistry sets.
"Where are my pick and shovel?"—or words to that effect—he'll say to his son and heir.
Raymond will favor him with a pleasant smile. "I don't know."
"I bet the next-door neighbors' kids have a fine set of tools," Ray says bitterly.
"They go to bed at seven," he tells you about his sons. And adds, "They're still running around the bedroom at eleven."
Tommy, who's exhausted from staying up so late, has developed a new trick. He gets up in the morning, has his breakfast, goes back to bed around nine, and sleeps till noon. Then he rises, prepared for the night's festivities. Barbara's too young to know what's going on, but both boys get upset if anything happens to Ray on TV. The night Bob "shoved Ray out of a fifteen-story window," Raymond and Tommy tore out of the room screaming. "It was," says Ray, "a pretty hectic night at my house."
Ray's hobby is photography (he doesn't develop his own stuff, doesn't have the time); Bob's is painting.

Bob is, in fact, a frustrated artist. He never studied the craft particularly, but, if he hadn't had a radio job when he got out of the Army, he might have turned into another Winslow Homer. He likes to do seascapes, and he once exhibited. Well, that is, not exactly exhibited ... it seems there was an ad club show in Boston. ...
Anyhow, if that fish wasn't over the mantel, a seascape would be.
Bob also plays the ukulele, bringing to this effort the same lack of training, and the same gusto, with which he paints.
Ray can get a few notes out of a small toy trumpet, but they all sound like "Taps," even when he's doing "White Christmas." And, besides, the only time he really gets any pleasure out of trumpeting is when Bob's talking to somebody, and he, Ray, sees an opportunity to confuse an issue or two.
Which is one reason why venturing into their NBC office is an act of recklessness. They sit behind their desks looking more or less normal, but don't let that fool you. Ray's nameplate is upside down. "For people who come in upset," he says. Bob's feet are waving in the breeze. "I was wearing these shoes when I got into show business," he says. "Three weeks ago."
"We're getting a new sponsor," Ray says gravely. "His products are right out of this world."
"Available only on Mars," adds Bob, "and perhaps Neptune. Our show will be out of this world, too."
That's the way it goes—and so do you. As you reel out, the tinny music of a toy trumpet follows you. It's playing "Taps."

What's Zoo in the World of Puns

Tex Avery made some of the greatest cartoons of all time. And then there are some others that...well, they’re full of something you associate more with Nebraska than Texas—corn.

There was a temptation in the 1930s and into the ‘40s to engage in the most obvious puns possible when coming up with spot gag cartoons. Tex and writer Mel Millar fell for it in A Day at the Zoo (1939). Here are five. I probably don’t even have to say what they are; you’ll get it looking at the drawing.



A pack of camels. Carl Stalling gets into the punny mood by underscoring the scene with The Campbells Are Coming. Camel. Campbell. Get it?



A North American Greyhound. (Note the Greyhound bus logo on the side). Stalling plays California, Here I Come in the background.



Two bucks.



And five sense. Stalling hokes it up with We’re in the Money in the background.



Here are two friendly elks, played by Mel Blanc and (I think) Danny Webb. Background tune: For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow. The rotund member of the Elks Club has an elk’s tooth on his watch chain; teeth and watch chains were standard any time there was an elk gag on radio.

At least we don’t get a dog/tree gag.

Gil Warren is the narrator and if you ever see a version of this with original titles, it’ll say that Ham Hamilton was the animator.

In the Money, Out of Frame

A couple of characters disappear for a frame in the Warners cartoon We’re In The Money (1933).

The head and arm of a little girl doll vanishes when blowing a tuba.



And a pair of long underwear bapping its flap to the title song hides for a frame.



As this is a Harman-Ising cartoon, one of the toy men does the same slide-step dance as Bosko (twice).

Friz Freleng and Larry Martin get the animation credits. Friz’ status in the business is legendary. Martin isn’t as well known. He was a member of the Los Angeles Times Junior Cartoon Club in 1926 and ’27. A Mary J. Martin lived at the same address as given in a 1926 edition of the Times. Martin’s claim to fame was being the model for Dishonest John of the Beany and Cecil puppet show/cartoons. Beany’s creator, Bob Clampett, once explained how he worked under Martin when Harman and Ising worked for Leon Schlesinger, drew caricatures of Martin as an 1890s melodrama villain and labelled them Dirty Dalton. Clampett said Martin later came to work for him at Snowball in 1961 and when asked about model sheets for Dishonest John was told to look in the mirror. Martin moved with Harman and Ising to MGM, but was at the Schlesinger studio in 1937 (Variety reported Martin’s wife was seriously ill). I haven’t been able to find any other information about him.

No Benny Ban In Boston

Jack Benny made more money out of vaudeville when it was dying than when it was living.

During the early years of his radio show, Benny would pack up his cast and take it on location to some city and do a broadcast. But the real reason for the visit was to bring his tour company to town, appear for several days at a local theatre and rake in the Depression dollars. In Benny’s last real vaudeville gig before radio in 1932, he got paid a lot less than headliner Lou Holtz. Now, his popularity on radio allowed him to charge a theatre as much as he could get away with, and record crowds showed up, adding even more cash to his bank account. As the song goes, “Ol' Man Depression, you are through, you done us wrong!”

So it was the Benny entourage stopped in Boston at the end of April 1936 where Jack talked to reporters. The Boston Globe’s story is interesting in what it doesn’t say. A good portion of the interview is about Mary Livingstone, who isn’t even there. She couldn’t be bothered to wake up early enough to catch the train to Boston. If you think about how often he toured in his later years, Jack spent an awful lot of his life away from Mary; at home, they had separate rooms. Yet, as far as anyone knows, they were in love for the rest of their lives. The other interesting comment is the one about not depending on an author and writing a lot of radio material himself. Benny had plenty of highly-paid writers he depended upon through his career. But when Jack made this particular comment, his writer, Harry Conn, had walked out on him only weeks before. The “official” reason was Conn was sick, but soon he surfaced in someone else’s employment, telling anyone who would republish his comments that he made Jack Benny, a claim that proved ridiculous.

Jack talked of retiring. He never did. He worked until he died. Mary, of course, pulled out when she finally convinced Jack to let her.

This story appeared on April 24, 1936, two days before the broadcast.

Jack Benny Can’t “Take It Easy”
Radio Topnotcher Finds Movies Relief
By MARJORY ADAMS
Jack Benny would like to take a vacation from being “radio’s funniest comedian.” He is surfeited with being elected the most popular radio attraction on the air, and he thinks he would enjoy a year away from the ether waves. Motion pictures seem to him a welcome relief—a real holiday—after the “mental agony” of putting on a successful radio program every week.
And Mary Livingston, his wife, who is considered one of the most amusing and popular personalities on the air, admits that she would like being just Mrs Jack Benny for a change. If Jack Benny decided tomorrow that his charming little wife should retire to private life, to be merely the mother of little Joan Benny, Miss Livingston wouldn’t say a word in objection. Her idea of being on the radio is merely to please her husband.
Mary Still Surprised

Yesterday afternoon Mr Benny received the press at his Ritz-Carlton suite. Mary hadn’t been able to get up early enough to make the train, so she wasn’t due in Boston until many hours later. However, Mr Benny did all the talking for the Benny duo. And he was insistent upon one thing—that Mary Livingston Benny never was a show person, and still hasn’t any idea what being a celebrity is all about. Each time she comes to a new city and people press about her admiringly, she is enchanted anew. It is like becoming a fairy princess overnight, and Mrs Benny can’t quite realize that appearing briefly on her husband’s radio hour has won her this delightful acclaim.
This week, commencing this morning, Jack and Mary are starring in a revue at the Metropolitan Theatre. Mary enjoys the excitement very much. But she would be just as happy at home, listening to her husband expound his theories on entertainment. In other words, Mary Livingston is just a home girl who has become a public character and can’t quite realize it yet.
Can’t “Take It Easy”
Mr Benny says that being on the radio, and trying to life up to being a star, is the hardest job a man can have. He would rather be “among the first few headliners,” since it would mean less worry and trouble for him. If you stand at the top you must try to stay there, and it is always very difficult.
Eventually you are going to topple over and some one else will take your place as radio’s most popular star. That will make news, too, and it is the first step toward oblivion.
“I can’t take it easy,” complained Mr Benny, “and that is one of the reasons why I’d like to go into pictures. The film stars may tell you how hard they work, but it is all bunk. The hardest work is mental, as everybody knows. And there’s no mental agony connected with a film role. It would be just another vacation for Mary and me.”
When Jack’s radio author is ill it is Mr Benny himself who must step into the gap. “If I depended upon an author then my act would be weak,” he said. “A star must write a lot of his stuff himself if he expects to remain a star very long. Otherwise, his author can switch to a new personality, at an increased salary, and make a bum out of the former headliner.”

On the evening of the 23rd, Jack and Mary were apparently expected to appear at the Kirkland House Spring Dance where Cab Calloway was playing but weren’t spotted, according to the Harvard Crimson.

Not all of Jack’s radio cast was in his stage show. Orchestra leader Johnny Green found a way to make some extra cash by spending time at a Boston department store autographing his Brunswick 78s for customers who bought them. Mary wasn’t generally in the show and, more often than not, Benny employed a vocalist other than whomever was on the radio show. The Chicken Sisters, a hardy concept that Benny utilised in television and years later in Vegas, included Blanche Stewart, who was a regular secondary player on the radio show through most of the ‘30s and then again in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. Who assembled the act? Did Jack audition people, such as the acrobats? Questions I can’t answer.

This review of the opening night of the revue was published in the Globe on April 25th.

Jack Benny’s quiet humor, his engaging personality, and the delightfully “dizzy” poetry of Mary Livingston hit the spot in superlative vein with audiences at the Metropolitan Theatre yesterday where a record for attendance was equalled only by the record of enthusiasm with which these stars of the radio were greeted.
The fact that Mr Benny and his “poetess” wife were in Boston a comparatively short time ago has not the least dimmed their drawing power nor the responsiveness of their devoted and loyal boosters.

At any rate, Jack was right at home, cavorting with the very clever Liazeed troup of Arabian tumblers and acrobats; playing his beloved violin, acting as “straight” man for the famous Chicken Sisters, and praising the singing of golden voiced Kenny Baker. Mary Livingston had a poem about Boston for her local audiences, in which she managed to combine beauties of fish cakes and Boston girls, Harvard University and Boston baked beans and other lyrical outbursts. She also sang “Eeeny Meeny Miny Mo”—which is just the sort of song one would pick out for this fluffy-minded young woman.
Opening with the spectacular Stuart Morgan dancers, the revue this week is a masterly presentation of first rate entertainment and excellent showmanship. Jack Benny doesn’t make his admirers wait until the final number of appear, but strolls out earl to act as master of ceremonies and to wise-crack throughout the remainder of the revue. There is no doubt but that Jack understands what audiences like, and he gives it to them with as little flurry as possible, to their gratifying appreciation.

One person’s name that is noticeable by its absence is Don Wilson’s. All that was mentioned on the show was that “Don Wilson couldn’t make it;” no reason was given. Someone else filled in for him, and therein is an interesting tale. The fill-in is Pat Weaver. Yes, the same Pat Weaver who later became president of NBC. In 1932, Weaver had been a continuity writer (including comedy) at KHJ Los Angeles before moving into producing shows. He was transferred to KFRC San Francisco where he did the same thing. In October 1935, he arrived at Young & Rubicam in New York where he was soon supervising its radio shows. He was directly involved with the Fred Allen show but oversaw Benny’s programme for General Foods. That means Weaver was the man at the agency in charge of Benny when Harry Conn walked out. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Weaver reacted to help protect Y&R’s investment by taking the train to Boston, helped Benny write the April 26th show on an emergency basis, then, as he had been on the air in California, filled in for Wilson that evening. It’s the only time the man later credited with creating NBC’s Today and Tonight shows had any direct, on-air involvement with one of NBC’s top radio comedians.