An attractively drawn version of Tom and Jerry dance to a song I haven’t been able to identify dance on the African ground in Jungle Jam (1931).
Wait! The ground has grown eyes.
Yes, they’re alligators. Tom, as he’s apt to do in Van Beuren cartoons, gets all a-scared in a cycle of six drawings. Look at Tom’s hands in the first drawing. They’re little circles on a bigger circle.
There’s a lot of dancing and a lot of cannibals in this and some of the odd humour you’d normally expect in a Van Beuren cartoon.
John Foster and George Rufle handle the direction.
No, Jack Benny did not spend eight years in university. No, he did not want to be a radio announcer.
Those are some of the gag responses he gave (written, I suspect, by his writer Harry Conn) in an interview he gave in 1934.
The rest of the biography in this feature story published in the Charleston Daily Mail of December 4th seems reasonably accurate. For some reason, it skips the Salisbury and Benny debut of his professional career. His screen debut was actually in a 1928 Warner Bros. short Bright Moments. His comment about relatives is a quip; he only had one sister. And I’m a bit sceptical that his father handed him a monkey wrench; I suspect Meyer Kubelsky would want him to take over the family business.
The reference to television shouldn’t be surprising. New York City had several experimental stations with regular programming in the early 1930s. It just took a while to move from mechanical to electronic TV sets, decide on transmission rates and wait for the war to end so programme (and set manufacture) could be expanded.
Jack Benny Talked His Way Into Broadcasting
Despite His Violin
Jack Benny, funnyman of the air, was sealed in the National Broadcasting company studios in New York rehearsing for his program when approached by the interviewer.
“Oh that's O. K., shoot. I don't mind but please spell my name right—I'm Jack Benny and not Jack Denny of orchestra ‘ennys. Get it right. Benny—B, as in Bean Soup—E, as in Sharkee, the fighter—N. as in Knickers—another N. as in pneumonia and Y. as in the state of Yoming.”
“O. K., Mr. Benny. Do you like broadcasting?”
“Do I like broadcasting. I like it very much. You can't hear the audience hiss.”
“Where were you born Mr. Benny?”
“What cities do you like best.”
“Oh I like Mount Vernon, Los Angeles and Boston.”
“That's fine; make it Philadelphia.”
“Were you really born in Philadelphia?”
“No, but I like Philly and as soon as the Athletics get a real team the pennant will be a cinch.”
“But where were you born?”
“I tell you son, there's nothing like fresh air and spinach to tone you up for rehearsals.”
“Where did you say you were born?”
“This fellow Roosevelt is certainly doing a grand job.”
“Where were you born?”
“I think his Gettysburg speech hit the right spot.”
“Do you think we'll have free beer next week?” Born in Illinois
“Well, if you are going to keep harping on that subject, I was born in Lake Forest, Ill. I had one father and one mother. I spent eight years at college, the University of Illinois . . . and don't ask me if I was a freshman for eight years. It was only two. I didn't attend classes: I was a cook. Then I wanted to become a radio announcer, so I practiced talking to myself, but I never got the job as a few people listen in to every program and talking to yourself does a person no good.
“What's that, rehearsal. O. K.”
“So long, remember—the name's Benny.”
That is what Jack Benny, comedian, wit, and silent violin player had to say about himself. However, this youthful looking, sprightly radio star, is as interesting as the many situations he portrays on his programs.
A bit under six feet, gray-tinged hair, ruddy complexion and seldom smiling, Jack Benny is the antithesis of what one in his occupation should be like.
Jack Benny by training, origin and practice was a fiddler. His friends say it took a World war to start him talking. Before joining Uncle Sam's sea forces (the navy, he means) Benny played a violin in vaudeville and said nothing. After one attempt to raise funds with a musical appeal at a seamen's benefit, he dropped the violin and started talking.
Since, then Jack has talked his way through several Shubert musical revues, two editions of Earl Carroll’s “Vanities,” several Pacific coast theaters, half a dozen motion pictures and into radio as a laugh-getting master of ceremonies.
He is noted as a wit, monologist, comedian. His quips and stories have enlivened stage, screen and air shows. But by force of habit, Benny still carries his violin when making stage appearances. He never plays it, just carries it, looks at it wistfully and gives the customer the impression he couldn’t play it if he wanted to. Someday, he says, he’s going to use it again, provide he can stop long enough to talk. Learned the Violin
Always an ambitious youth, Benny learned to play the violin with the same ease he learned to talk. His family lived in Waukegan, Ill. For 17 years Jack remained in that community, because it was the only place he could eat free. At six he started his violin. One of his favorite gags is to run his bow across the strings in screechy strains and yell, “It’s five o’clock Ma, can I go out now?” That shows he liked to practice. At 13 he changed his mind and really took a liking to the violin. At 14 he determine to enter on a professional career with his violin.
He started with a Waukegan orchestra playing the dances in and around the home town. He was 16 then, and after one year with the orchestra decided he had sufficient professional standing to go on the stage. With a partner who played the piano while he played the fiddle, Benny launched his first vaudeville act.
For six years he toured back and forth across the United States, playing his violin and saying nothing. Then the United States entered the war, and Benny joined the navy. As a musician he was soon drafted for sailor shows for the seaman’s benefit fund. His violin playing brought applause—everybody applauded free talent—but no contributions. After all, reasoned Benny, if you want money, you have to ask for it. Even at that time he knew human nature. He put the instrument down and broke a six-year silence.
He got contributions. But what surprised him more, he got laughs. Gingerly, he tried out a few more gags. A wave of laughter swept through the audience. At the next show, Benny played less and wise-cracked more. When the war was over he returned to vaudeville—as a monologist.
In the years that followed, Jack Benny, a glib young man carrying a silent violin, became a celebrated comedian. He was a headliner in vaudeville, and one of the first and most successful masters of ceremonies in Broadway revues, He was a popular night club entertainer.
Apparently, he was permanently attached to the theater when the end of a transcontinental tour in vaudeville brought him to the Orpheum theater in Los Angeles. Benny stayed at the Orpheum for eight straight weeks, establishing a new house record for a single artist. Meanwhile talking pictures and the first wave of screen revues came to Hollywood. Talked Way In
To keep the talking Jack Benny out of the “talkies” would have been a real problem. Nobody tried to. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer promptly offered him a contract, and he made his screen debut as a master of ceremonies in the Hollywood revue “Chasing Rainbows”, and “Medicine Man” followed. Other features followed that. Then comedy shorts, and Mary Livingtone.
And Mary Livingstone after hearing Jack Benny talk on and on and on, just nodded her head, and came east with him as Mrs. Jack Benny. She is the Mary you hear on his broadcasts.
They arrived in New York, just as Earl Carroll was casting the annual edition of his Vanities. At Carroll’s request, Benny dropped in to witness a rehearsal. When the curtain went up the opening night Benny was still there. He was, in fact, the star of the show.
For two years he was the leading comedian and master of ceremonies in the Carroll revue. Then came radio, and “maybe television will soon be here so they see my violin,” he says.
Talking of the violin, Benny's proudest possession is a letter he received after one of his violin solos (he called it that) on the air. The letter read:
“Dear Mr. Benny: For several months our family had been starving the wolf was at the door. Then one night we tuned in on your program. By the time you finished your violin solo, the wolf had left forever.”
When broadcasting, Benny always wears his hat. Unlike most people he likes relatives, “because they send mail to my sponsors.”
And back to his violin again, he says:
“My father gave me a violin and a monkey wrench. He told me not to take chances. Plumbing isn't a bad business.”
When you dig around the byways of animation history, occasionally you run into some puzzling things. One is a story published in the Baltimore Sun of January 10, 1937.
New Type Short Film To Be Produced In Technicolor And Will Feature Color Images Produced By Sound Waves
Hollywood.
A UNIQUE type of short subject, featuring color images created by sound waves, is to be introduced this season.
Though the method by which the shorts are made is shrouded in secrecy, they will be in technicolor and will include the use of miniature comedy characters.
Oscar Fishinger, inventor of the novel technique, will create the subjects and Leon Schlesinger will produce them.
The first subjects will be experimental in character and, if they meet with the anticipated response, will take a prominent place in the array short of subjects.
The new productions, it was stated, are definitely not cartoon comedies.
"It is something entirely new to the short subject field," stated Jack Chertok, head of the short subjects department, "and will be presented in one-reel length.
The first will be ready for showing early next year."
What’s odd is Jack Chertok was the head of short subjects at MGM. Leon Schlesinger released his shorts through Warner Bros. How could they be connected?
Leon’s deal with Warners wasn’t exclusive. The Hollywood Reporter of November 19, 1936 announced:
SCHLESINGER, FISHINGER ON MGM TUNE-COLOR PIC
An unusual short will be made by MGM that brings together Leon Schlesinger, Warners cartoon producer, and Oscar Fishinger, imported by Paramount from Austria, to produce a short in Technicolor featuring color images tied in with music.
Fishinger, inventor of the process, was employed by Paramount to produce his unique color-music footage for "The Big Broadcast of 1937," but the studio could find no place in the picture for the footage. The inventor has now left Paramount. Schlesinger's arrangement as producer for MGM on this short does not effect [sic] his Warner status.
The short will be in the nature of an experiment, with more to follow if it is successful. Jack Chertok will supervise production.
The agreement was very brief. Film Daily of November 24, 1936 reported “Leon Schlesinger has been released from his contract with MGM to produce a series of color-musical cartoons using a new process of Oscar Fishinger. Schlesinger's release came at his own request.” Could this have been the deal the Baltimore Sun was reporting on, just a little bit late? Papers back then sometimes withheld feature stories for months.
More research will have to be done about that. In the meantime, the story leaves another question—were Oskar Fischinger’s animated shorts ever released?
Fischinger may be known to animation fans for his work on Walt Disney’s Fantasia more than anything else. He had been involved in experimental animation in Germany in the early ‘20s before coming to the U.S.
His first stop was Paramount. Here’s a 1936 story.
Hollywood News and Gossip
By PAUL HARRISON NEA Service Staff Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD, June 15.—One of these months when you go to the movies and are brought face-to-screen with visual music in color and in agitated futuristic forms don’t scoff audibly. It’s art. And don’t say you weren’t warned either.
The sole impresario of this new art form is a man named Oscar Fischinger, who just now is hidden away in a laboratory on the Paramount lot.
He toils there in happy obscurity, and the only persons who know anything about him are a couple of executives, some painters acquainted with his work in Europe. and a few highbrow musicians such as Leopold Stokowski.
Fischinger doesn’t speak English and so is spared from spending all his time explaining just what it is he’s trying to do.
The simplest explanation is that he makes designs which move on the screen in accompaniment to music. The designs don’t look like anything you ever saw outside a kaleidoscope although they are not so stylized nor always geometric.
There are dots and lines, circles, and columns, blocks and balls, streaks and wings of light that swoop, swirl, dance, quiver, diminish, grow, and glow all over the screen.
Fischinger may “see” a heavy drum beat as an orange sphere shooting down a purple tunnel, or the music of many violins as a battalion of yellow lines converging into a crescendo of red rings. Crazy, but Nice
Sounds crazy? Maybe it is. But it also is pleasant to watch. The artist says his shifting color patterns are abstractions.
Hollywood will find a better term because it knows that American lay critics of the arts have a private suspicion that all abstractionists, together with surrealists, cubists, and futurists are only a couple of jumps way from the boobyhatch.
You can kid the public by hanging in a snooty art gallery a mad jumble of blatant blobs and labelling it “Nude Playing Badminton” or “Eggbeater No. 7,” or anything you like. But you can’t kid the public in a movie theatre.
Indeed the first time one of Fischinger’s shorts was shown in a movie theatre there was a free-for-all fight. That was in Paris in 1921. Some customers thought it was swell; others were outraged. Form of Ballet
But that was before the days of talkies and color. Now he has put them all together so that music has color, sound, form, and movement. You can best liken it to a ballet.
In fact, some of his sequences immediately suggest dancing figures on a stage. But the forms do tricks that Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Fred Astaire never dreamed of.
A lot of European art critics have raved immoderately over Fischinger’s visualizations of music. He has received prizes at the International Film Expositions in Venice. Academics of art exhibit his stuff to students.
The public likes his work. I saw a review from a Holland newspaper which devoted nearly two columns to one of his shorts. At the end were two paragraphs about the premiere, on the same program, of Grace Moore’s latest picture. Started With Shakespeare
Fischinger was a young engineer in Munich when he began monkeying with abstract motion pictures. His first one was made to illustrate a lecture he gave about Shakespeare. The audience thought he was pixillated.
But his fame grew and he moved to Berlin and established a laboratory. Now he’s in America to stay. What he’s working on today is a special sequence that will be part of “The Big Broadcast.” After that he’ll make shorts as he did in Europe.
He works mostly from printed scores, without bothering to hear them played. Squints at the notes and figures how they ought to be represented on the screen.
He draws and colors key designs, and four girl assistants do the rest. Actual production is exactly like the process of animating cartoons; thousands of paintings must be made and photographed one at a time. Blue in Red
Through an interpreter I asked Fischinger how he’d score “Rhapsody in Blue.” He said he’d probably do it mostly in red.
In a story the following month, George Shaffer of the Chicago Tribune Press Service described the visualisation of the music: “little geometric figures move in graceful unison. Sometimes they undulate, sometimes they advance or retreat, move right or left. For staccato notes, the little figures explode. For minors they sway. On long sustained notes a group of the figures slide down a long tunnel. Fishinger’s novelty is hard to describe, but is pleasing to the eye.”
Paramount decided to pass on Fischinger’s abstract film ideas and that took him to Metro. He managed to get some films made. Variety reported on February 16, 1938:
Oskar Fischinger, German technician at Metro, is the entire production staff—producer, artist, effects man, cameraman and cutter—on a screen oddity titled ‘Optical Poem,’ in which surrealism runs amok. One-spooler features color movement against a dark background, using circles, squares, arrows, etc. Creator insists colored symbols play on the human emotions in the same manner as music.
The Manchester Guardian of March 24, 1938 explained the film was “an abstract visual accompaniment to Liszt’s ‘Hungarian Rhapsody.’ It is in colour and took six months to make...It will be interesting, all the same, to see whether Hollywood has managed to introduce any popular element into this most esoteric branch of the cinema.”
An Optical Poem was released to theatres on March 5, 1938. It was part of an umbrella series of released called “Miniatures.”
Someone who got a chance to view the short was, of all people, Ed Sullivan. This was back when he was a syndicated New York gossip columnist, long before his TV variety show days. He had a sojourn in Hollywood and wrote on March 30, 1938:
At M-G-M your reporter sees a short that will most certainly with a special academy award. . . . Oskar Fischinger, who conceived it, convinced Short Producer Jack Chertok that music could be expressed in tones of color. . . . As the second Hungarian Rhapsody plays, curved and straight lines of color appear on the screen and gloves of blue, brown, orange, and scarlet engage in minuets of motion. . . . This sort of thing finds Hollywood at its cultural best.
Harland Rankin, manager of the Plaza Theatre in Tilbury, Ontario told the Motion Picture Herald it was “One of finest musical interpretations ever shown. The audience gave it a nice hand.” MGM made it available in the mid-‘40s for schools to rent.
This film was apparently his solitary short for Metro. The Los Angeles Times reported on February 18, 1940 that Composition in Blue, from Nicolai’s Merry Wives of Windsor Suite and Divertissement of Mozart had been held over but it had been made by Fischinger in Germany.
After Fantasia, he continued with his experiments. His Motion Painting No 1 won the Grand Prize at the 1948 Brussels Film Festival. His artwork was the subject of exhibits. Fischinger died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on February 1, 1967 at the age of 66.
Fischinger’s official web site is still active and you can learn more there about his interesting career.
You can watch An Optical Poem, complete with MGM titles, below.
Private Snafu is dreaming at his outpost about...what else? Women. It is 1944, so she does have some clothes on (today, she’d probably have massively oversized you-know-whats to appeal to 13-year-old boys of all ages).
Snafu’s order-taking gooney bird gets the idea, too.
Everything’s fine until the females switch places. Snafu wakes up rather annoyed.
Snafu remains clueless and facetious through the whole cartoon while the gooney bird has the smarts that results in the Japanese fleet being sunk. Take that, Tojo!
Bob Clampett saved a pile of work for his animators in Buckaroo Bugs. Other than a bit of effects animation, about the first 25 seconds of the cartoon is a camera is taken up panning and moving into and out of background art.
The camera zips back and forth as Mel Blanc, Bob Bruce and a female voice yell about the Masked Marauder.
What’d the Marauder get? All the cartoons from the town’s Victory Garden. There’s a slow pan over a background drawing setting up the situation.
Director Bob Clampett’s anonymous background and layout artist give us a couple of up shots. I can’t snip the scene together because a tree is on an overlay in the foreground and panned at a different rate than the background. Clampett does a fair bit of that during the cartoon.
Clampett and storyman Lou Lilly use Red Skelton’s Sheriff Deadeye as a model for Red Hot Rider, and end the short with another radio reference, the catchphrase of the quiz show Take It Or Leave It
Fred Allen’s sudden death on a sidewalk of New York in 1956 was mourned far and wide. Allen was appreciated for his clever turns of phrase and his humanitarianism.
Allen rose through vaudeville and went into radio when networks screamed for comedy/variety shows in the early 1930s.
If Allen had his way, he would have been a writer. No sponsors to interfere (just editors, perhaps), no limits of the clock to stick to. He wrote two books, one dealing with his early life and the tribulations of trying to make the big time in vaudeville called Much Ado About Me.
A newspaper writer in Allen’s home town of Boston added a little personal postscript to Allen’s book at the end of 1956. This story appeared in some editions of the Globe on December 26th.
One Story He Left Out of His Book Fred Allen Gag Idea--Sell Cape Water By KEN CROTTY
The book-reading public is making quite a to-do about a new book entitled “Much Ado About Me,” which has been on the book stalls for the last few weeks.
The author of "Much Ado About Me" is, of course, the late Fred Allen, whom many people consider the greatest natural comic of our times.
Mr. Allen does a bit of journalism wandering down memory lane in “Much Ado About Me” but he leaves unmentioned a little incident which happened at Harwich on Cape Cod which was a pure stroke of Allen genius.
It happened in July, 1953.
The Allens—Fred and Portland—invariably put up for the month of July at the swank Belmont Hotel at West Harwich.
The Belmont was an ideal vacation spot for the Allens. The cuisine is excellent, the bathing is among the best on the Cape and the location is such that it lends itself either to social butterflying or isolation exactly as the mood seizes one.
That Summer I was covering the Cape for the Boston Post and in no time the word came over the grapevine that Fred was doing his annual slow burn under Cape suns.
I went over to the Belmont one Saturday afternoon. It was a lush July day. The sun was dripping with infra-red rays and the sky was as blue as the backdrop for a Hollywood musical.
Fred was out on the beach in a bathing suit. His back was propped against the wall of one of the beach houses on the periphery of the Belmont's private bathing beach.
He was reading a book. He put it down as I came up. It was an English version of Proust a “Remembrance of Things Past.”
“No place like the Cape for catching up on your Proust,” he said.
He looked trim and fit after two weeks among the dunes and the cranberries.
“This is the life,” he explained, “Nothing to do but to get healthy. I started coming here too late. Now the government's got my money and I've got high blood pressure. If Uncle Sam had taken 80 percent of my blood pressure instead of my dough, that would have been something.”
The surf was coming in from Nantucket Sound in long, lazy rollers. It was a day for dreaming.
“You know, I'm working on a sort of package deal in Cape Cod vacations. Just think of all those land-locked lubbers out in Chicago who never get to know the magic of a real, bona fide Cape Cod vacation.
“My idea is to bottle Cape Cod sea water and market it to those duffers who can't spend a few days down here.
“Imagine a gent in Chicago opening up a drum of pure Cape Cod sea water and dunking himself in his bath tub on a hot Saturday afternoon. Almost like taking a belly flopper off one of those diving boards out there.”
Portland Hoffa drifted by on her way back to the hotel.
“I'll be along in a few minutes,” Fred said. She trudged off through the sand.
“We could send out a balloon of Cape Cod air, a jug of sea water, a carton of sand, a stuffed sea gull and a cranberry.
“Our Chicago friend could swish his feet around in the water, walk through the sand and then puncture the balloon. All the comforts of a Cape Cod vacation and at a very nominal fee. And then our friend could get the cranberry's point of view and listen to the complaints of the sea gull. What a package deal!
"We could even ship half bottles of pure Cape Cod sea water to those who prefer to get in at half tide and empty bottles for those who like to thrash around at low tide. It's a great idea.”
Fred admitted he'd spent a lot of his time on the Cape that Summer studying the cranberry.
“I've been hiding out behind a friendly sand dune with no company but a cranberry. Nobody has ever bothered to get the cranberry's point of view. I think it's high time somebody did.
“Cranberries know just how much to relax. That's a great danger to the visitor to Cape Cod relaxing. You get so you over-relax and you never do get up enough energy to go home. That's what makes natives down here.”
A youngster wandered over to where Fred and I were chatting. He was about 10 years old.
“Well, sonny,” said Fred, “what can I do for you?”
“You're Fred Allen, aren't you?” the youngster asked.
Fred laughed that funny, little laugh of his that so many radio and TV fans knew so well.
“Well, I think so,” he said.
The youngster looked back to the group he'd just left. “I want to be an actor like you,” he blurted out, “and my mother told me I should come over here and ask you how I do it.”
“Oh, she did, did she,” said Fred. “Well, I'll tell you just what you should do. You find yourself a cranberry and study that cranberry.”
The youngster looked awfully bewildered.
Fred laughed again.
“Are you staying here, sonny?” he asked.
“Yes, I am,” the boy said.
“Well,” said Fred, “you come over to my table at dinner tonight and I'll tell you all about how you should go about becoming an actor.”
That was a Saturday afternoon in July, 1953.
I went all through Fred Allen’s “Much Ado About Me” but I couldn't find a single, solitary word about that Cape Cod package vacation deal.
As Fred described it three years ago, it sounded like a great idea.
Rubber hose animation abounds in The Terrible Toreador, a 1929 Silly Symphony, which was an attempt by animator Ub Iwerks and composer Carl Stalling to set a cartoon to snippets of music from “Carmen.”
Look at the garden hose arms and legs.
Not all Disney artists were adept at drawing hands. Check out these two consecutive shots. No, they don’t match, but the first version has basically a ball for a hand.
The evil Don keeps pulling the rubber arm and kissing it. When he’s surprised by the good guy toreador, he lets go of the senorita’s arm and it snaps back, smacking her in the face. It’s timed (and drawn) very much like a cartoon at Iwerks’ own studio a few years later.
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The bullfight is pretty good, with more rubber hose, and the ferocious bull turning, um, fey for an extended scene after being smacked on the butt, and the usual Disney-character-zooms-at-the-camera shots.
The title character of The Hick Chick (aka Daisy Goon) kisses Lem. A typical Tex Avery-style reaction follows. We even get some perspective animation.
It’s a good thing this is a fun blog and not one of those intellectual ones where I would pontificate on the symbolism behind the scene involving the rooster crow.
Walt Clinton, Ed Love, Preston Blair and Ray Abrams are the credited animators, with backgrounds by Johnny Johnsen. Avery and writer Heck Allen borrow from, and use, Red Skelton’s Clem Kaddiddlehopper character as a starting point for this 1946 cartoon.
Jack Benny and his writers, at times, struggled over a single word on a script, so it’s odd to hear that he “often changes the script after the program has started.” But that was the claim in a feature story on the Benny radio show in its waning days in New York City.
It’s true Jack would ad-lib, and some of the cast members would as well, but it didn’t happen very often. If a show was falling apart (generally when someone blew a line), Jack would play that up to the audience with some comments and they’d laugh probably louder than they were if things were going according to the printed page.
This story was published on March 3, 1936. The show had returned from Los Angeles only a few weeks earlier and would leave its New York City base for good by the end of May (returning occasionally until the early ‘50s over the years for a week or two at a time). It mentions writer Harry Conn, who would soon walk away from Benny in a fit of ego that proved to be an incredible stupid career move but one that benefitted Benny in the long run.
Jack’s off-the-air life is abruptly summed up in the final paragraph.
Jack Benny Rehearses Little So Mary Livingstone Just Says Anything and Radio Fans Roar Couple Voted First Place on All Air Programs Two Years
HOPE TO GET RICH AND END CLOWNING This is the third of a series of articles by Dorothy Roe on the intimate personalities of America's leading radio entertainers. By DOROTHY ROE (Copyright, 1936, Universal Service. Inc.)
New York, March 3.—Jack Benny points his cigar severely at Mary Livingstone and demands:
"Woman, don't you know we have to go on the air in 20 minutes?"
Mary powders her nose, ruffles her script and trills:
"Wouldn't it be funny if we didn't go on tonight?" Jack replies severely:
"Whaddaya mean—funny?"
Mary widens her immense brown eves and says innocently:
"Well, I'll bet a lot of people would think we were funnier if we didn't say anything at all." Everybody Happy
That is a sample of a Jack Benny rehearsal. Jack and Mary, who is his wife, always intend to rehearse. They go down to the N. B. C. studios sometimes a whole hour and a half before their program goes on the air. But then Don Wilson, their cherubic announcer; Kenny Baker, their youthful tenor: Johnny Green, their orchestra leader; Harry Conn, their script writer, and the other members of the cast always have a lot of new gags and, what with this and what with that, time marches on.
But nobody seems to care whether Jack and Mary rehearse or not. The fact that the radio public has just voted them first place over all air programs for the second year in succession proves that.
And if the sounds of merriment that come through your radio of a Sunday evening make you think Jack and Mary and the boys and girls are having a good time earning their daily bread you guessed right.
Radio's No. 1 comedian goes on the air with less preparation than probably any other artist of the air waves.
Benny, bland, carefree, chewing his eternal cigar, explains:
"If we rehearsed too much, the program would be wooden. You see, we gotta be in the mood." Little Preparation
One reading of the script, with the entire cast, and one so-called "dress rehearsal" with the microphone takes care of the preparation for the program, and that, it is explained, is done chiefly for timing.
Benny often changes his script after the program has started on the air, and Mary knows how to keep up with his ad libs.
It was an accident, as a matter of fact, that launched Mary Livingstone on an air career along with her famous husband. One night the script ran short during a broadcast, and Jack had to improvise. He called to Mary, who was sitting with the audience, and started an argument over the mike. Mary kept saying in a scared voice: "Hush, Jack, you're on the air. All those people will hear you." And the radio audience loved it. An avalanche of telegrams and mail proved that. So from then on Mary Livingstone was a part of the act. A "Dead-Pan" Voice
Jack explains:
"Mary doesn't have to act. She just naturally has a dead-pan voice. She not only is my best pal and severest critic, but my ideal deadpan straight man."
And that may be a new kind of romantic compliment, but it came from the heart.
While most radio script writers keep from two to six weeks ahead with their programs, the Benny rang never even thinks of what the Sunday night act is to be until along about Thursday. Then Benny gets together with Conn, and the two map out the rough outlines of the script.
Nothing more is done about it until Saturday morning, when Benny reads through the script with his director and sponsors—that's to be sure the script is safe—that there is no danger of libel or censorship or any of the bogey men of radio.
The only real rehearsal takes place just before the program goes on the air and that is a performance which usually has even the studio page boys holding their sides. It goes something like this:
Jack: "Where are you reading? I'm on page nine."
Mary: "Well, I'm on page three. Skip it." 1500 in Audience
During a broadcast Jack chews a cigar, makes faces at the audience, executes a few dance steps now and then, and hangs his head prettily during applause. Broadcasts are held in one of the huge N.B.C. studios, before an audience of 1500, admitted by cards from the sponsors or the broadcasting company.
Both Jack and Mary throw the pages of their script on the floor as the broadcast progresses, and if anybody reads the wrong lines, that's all right. It gives them a chance to ad lib, which they would rather do than eat.
Sometimes the announcer, Roly Poly Don Wilson, goes into such roars of laughter during a broadcast that he is unable to talk, whereupon Benny nobly pinch hits. All members of the company, including the orchestra leader and Jack's secretary, are pressed into service before the 30-minute period on the air is over. And they love it. So does the public.
Jack fell in love with Mary Livingstone one day in Los Angeles, when she called him a ham actor and hired six little boys to sit in the front row at his show and not laugh. They have an adopted baby, Joan Naomi, 21 months old. Their closest friends are George Burns and Gracie Allen and their ambition is to get a million dollars so they won't have to be funny any more.
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