The Sweetheart of Lucky Strike

There were two Canadian singers associated with Jack Benny over the years. One was Gisele Mackenzie, who appeared on stage with him in Las Vegas and popped up on his radio and TV shows on occasion.

The other was Dorothy Collins.

The odd thing about their on-air relationship is they never interacted, to the best of my knowledge. In the radio days, she was in a studio in a completely different building singing whatever version of the Lucky Strike jingle the sponsor wanted in that particular season. When the show was transcribed, she simply cut the song and Don Wilson’s pre-recorded spiel would be inserted in between. There were rare mentions of her in the radio dialogue; Jack revealed on one show that Polly the parrot (Mel Blanc) was a huge fan of hers (Mel responded by squawking the jingle).

After her career with American Tobacco, she was featured on one of the incarnations of the TV show Candid Camera. She was only 67 when she died in 1994.

TV Guide had a charming profile of her in its edition of April 17, 1953. It doesn’t mention the Benny show but one of Jack’s TV broadcasts is the setting for a sidebar to the story showing yet another example of one of the pitfalls of going on the air live.

Dorothy Collins’ Success Key: Listen For Opportunity’s Knock
DOROTHY Collins is now riding the crest of success and she did it all without one use of the “go-getter” formula.
“The only time I ever really tried for anything,” the demure blonde star of Hit Parade and the Lucky Strike commercials said, “I didn’t get it.”
It was about the darkest hour for the 26-year-old singer who is now one of America’s best-known women. The Raymond Scott Quintet, with which she had been a featured vocalist in Detroit, had disbanded. Scott had come on to New York to direct the Hit Parade orchestra, succeeding his brother, the late Mark Warnow. Dorothy was at loose ends.
“I auditioned for a job in one of the New York night clubs,” Dorothy said ruefully. “It was the first and only time I ever went after a job. And I didn’t get it.
“I just didn’t know what I was doing. They didn’t want me. They wanted someone like . . . well, like Marilyn Monroe or perhaps Jane Russell.
But in two weeks from that dark day, she landed one of television’s most coveted jobs, without ever dreaming it was possible.
“Raymond had been commissioned to write a jingle for the Lucky Strike people,” she related. “He asked me if I would sing the words on the sample recording he was making. My name wasn’t mentioned. It was just a way of getting the lyrics across.”
This was the first of the new jingles for the cigarette form and the basis for the idea of staging commercials with all the trappings of a musical comedy.
But the agency people liked that anonymous voice as well as they did the jingle. They signed Dorothy Collins to introduce it. When Hit Parade was introduced on TV in the summer of 1950, she was featured in the carefully staged commercials.
Her winsome charm caught the fancy of TV audiences across the national and she was moved up almost immediately to be one of the Hit Parade principals, along with Snooky Lanson and Eileen Wilson.
Dorothy’s recipe for success is now this simple: “Just be around when lightning strikes.”
Interviewed in the brain factory of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, which handles the American Tobacco Co. account, Dorothy proved as sincere and unaffected as when she was plain Marjorie Chandler back in her native Windsor, Ont.
She is still able to giggle on occasion and to say, after revealing that she likes to do “sad love songs” best:
“It’s the first chance I’ve had to do dramatics. I guess it’s gone to my head.
Has Mobile Face
Dorothy is exceedingly gifted along this line with an exceedingly mobile face. Someone has estimated that she uses 47 changes of expression in a 35-second commercial.
“Dorothy,” one ad executive said admiringly, “does everything but wiggle her ears.”
This involves hard work. Dorothy works out the expressions as carefully as a choreographer arranging a dance.
“The things we strive for are naturalness and sincerity,” Dorothy says, “and that’s not easy when you’re giving a performance.”
Makes Film Versions
She learns each routine until it becomes automatic, so that she can do it without a thought. “With all the things going on in the studio during the commercial,” Dorothy explains, “you’d never be able to do it, if you had to think about it. I like to know it so well that I can be thinking of a thousand other things and it just pours out by itself.”
She now makes film versions of the commercials which are used on Robert Montgomery Presents, in addition to the one or two live spots on Hit Parade.
Her career has braced her for surprises. She sang first at 12 in a Windsor theater contest. She sounded a lot like Judy Garland and won first prize. A Detroit radio station invited her to sing on its children’s hour. When she was outgrowing that, Raymond Scott came along and invited her to sing with his Quintet. Then TV came along and invited her to be one of its stars.
She changed her name from Marjorie to Dorothy at the outset of her career. “Dorothy was my sister’s name and I like it.” Then she changed her last name to Collins because this made two Dorothy Chandlers in the family “and it got to be confusing.”
Her crowning success was the Dorothy Collins blouse, and she made that score, too, in her approved indirect method.
Some Movie Offers
She hasn’t had many ambitions beyond her present Hit Parade contract, although she has some Hollywood offers. At the moment she’s concentrating on furnishing her new Babylon, L.I. home.
Married last summer to Raymond Scott, she is still happy and thrilled with homemaking. It’s a big house and they’re trying to furnish it with individual early American pieces.

“It’s really three houses in one,” Dorothy explained. The man who built it moored his yacht there and he started with a garage, kitchen and bathroom.
“Then he built a house onto that, so the outside wall of the first building is the inside wall of the second. Then he built a third house and tied them all together.”
Works on Records
But as far as Dorothy is concerned be it ever so rambling there’s no place like home. She hopes to do something with photograph records, but she plans to do it all within her four (or is it 12?) walls.
A few years ago, Scott bought record-manufacturing equipment to put out his own line of master works. The venture failed, but the equipment remains.
“Now,” Dorothy says, “we’ll make our own records at home and offer them to the Decca people.”
It’s a nice way to work, and it may very well click. After all, things like that happen to Dorothy Collins.

Dorothy’s Longest 25 Seconds
This was Dorothy Collins’ worst moment on television. She was to do a live commercial from New York at the end of the Jack Benny show from Hollywood. She learned two versions—a 34-second spot and a one-minute commercial. And she knew them all perfectly.
The director ordered the short version. At the last second, the Benny show closed early and the director yelled: “The long one.”
“I did the short one,” Dorothy recalls, “then stood looking at the camera for the longest 25 seconds in television.”

The Test of Leon Schlesinger

“I’ll try you on one cartoon,” Leon Schlesinger told Tex Avery, who was bumming around looking for a job after Walter Lantz let him go. And in 1936, that seems to have been Leon’s policy, confirmed by an article that appeared in various newspapers about that time. (Film Daily announced in January a new Avery unit had been formed, then reported in August that Schlesinger had signed Frank Tashlin after he directed Porky’s Poultry Plant).

There’s no byline attached to this story, so its source is unknown. This version appeared in the Hackensack Record of July 8, 1935. “J. Patton King” is a fancy way of saying “Jack King,” the former and later Disney man. Riley Thompson was an animator who received some ‘30s screen credits. Ralph Wolf wasn’t credited at Schlesinger’s but his name was later purloined by Chuck Jones at Warners in the 1950s for a Wile E. Coyote lookalike who failed to capture sheep. Considering Leon’s background was vaudeville promotions and theatre management, it’s not surprising he can’t explain some aspects of film production.

CARTOONING FOR MOVIES IS HARD
Read This And Decide To Do Something Else
When young men go West (West being Hollywood to ambitious youth), they do one of three things: Try to break into the movies as actors, peddle their stories from studio to studio or attempt to sell their talents as animators.
This is about the latter group—those young men who have graduated from art schools or newspaper art departments and who are confident that they can draw animals and insects for the movie cartoons.

Once it was the ambition of those possessed of artistic talent to head for New York and there sell a newspaper comic strip to a syndicate.
Now the story is reversed. J. Patton King, Ralph Wolf and Riley Thompson, to name but a few, gave up drawing comic strips for a New York syndicate to accept flattering offers of Leon Schlesinger, producer of "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies", cartoon films.
But how is one to get into the animated cartoon business? Cartoonists would like to know.
Schlesinger hired his 60 animators via a test route. Strange as it may seem, cartoons photograph as differently as movie stars. Not even Schlesinger can explain the reason, but such is the case.
Before hiring an artist, he demands a test cartoon. This is photographed on movie film, the same as those of the employed artist. Later it is projected on the screen. If the cartoon photographs "well", Schlesinger considers the artist as a prospective employee.
To be one of the pen and ink creators of "Merrie Melodies" and "Looney Tunes", the artist must be more than a cartoonist. He must know, first of all, animation. That is, he must be able to draw 16 or more cartoons for each movement—of a character. This means that the cartoonist must know anatomy—how the foot moves, how the knee bends, how the hands move and similar anatomical technicalities.
It is not to wonder at then why so many top notch cartoonists have failed to make the grade in Hollywood.

Adding another boulder in the path of the would-be movie cartoonist, music plays an important role in drawing cartoons for the movies. Before the animator is a large sheet, divided into musical beats, which, when translated into terms of music, represents the musical score of the picture. Keeping in mind the beats, the animator finds just what the figure in the film must do, and in what sequence.
The cartoonist must never vary from these orders because the music for the film already has been recorded. In other words, the animator must draw his characters to fit the music.
Those who would be movie cartoon animators should not attempt to enter the business if they have the least tendency of becoming bored. It takes between 10,000 and 12,000 individual cartoons for one film. It takes 12 weeks to make one cartoon.
The most that the cameraman can shoot a day is 50 feet of film—photographed frame by frame. A cartoon is from 650 to 690 feet long and runs on the screen for about six and a half minutes.
Figure it out for yourself.

House of Yesterday

Remember the Tex Avery cartoon House of Tomorrow?

Tommy Morrison at Terrytoons did.

He grabbed the concept, complete with narrator, juicer and the mother-in-law and tossed them into Phoney News Flashes, released six years after the MGM spot-gagger.

“Here is one separate model which has one room for every member of the family—”



“—including mother-in-law.”



“Inside the house we find separate sleeping arrangements for Mr. and Mrs. Householder, Junior—”



“—and for mother-in-law.”



“Each kitchen is completely equipped including an all-inclusive super-juicer for Mr. and Mrs. For Junior—”



“—and for mother-in-law.”



You get the idea. Things go up-hill a bit from here; I actually liked the Cinemascope spoofs in the next scene.

As far as I can tell, Dayton Allen is using his real voice as the narrator. He later does a Durante impression.

Oh, I hope you noted the Mighty Mouse lamp in Junior’s room. Nothing like Paul Terry cross-promotion. Maybe he got the idea from his mother-in-law.

Wagon Ho Ho Ho

Droopy manages to thwart the cattle rancher throughout one of my favourite Tex Avery cartoons, Drag-a-Long Droopy (1954). The bad guy rancher jumps into sheepherder Droopy’s covered wagon, but because anything can happen in a Tex Avery cartoon, Droopy and his mule defy logic and gravity by going off on one direction and the wagon in another.



It takes seven frames for the wagon to turn into a surrey after hitting the cliff; it’s a gag Avery used in other MGM cartoons. These are two consecutive drawings.



The end result before Avery wipes into the next scene. Gritting his teeth, no doubt, Scott Bradley scores “The Old Grey Mare” in the background (various accounts have it Bradley hated old hat music in “his” cartoons).



Avery provides the voice of the wolf, Bill Thompson is Droopy while Mike Lah, Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons, Bob Bentley and Ray Patterson provide the animation in front of Johnny Johnsen’s backgrounds.

Miltie, March and Money

Milton Berle was network television’s first huge star. Starting in late 1948, vast sales of TV sets were credited to his Tuesday night show on NBC which was slowly adding affiliates as new stations were coming on the air.

Berle was the star of the Texaco Star Theatre which he had been hosting on radio to mixed reviews and audiences. Radio was never Berle’s forte. One of his short-lived ventures was a summer replacement show on CBS that was kind of an advice show with Berle’s hokey one-liners chucked in whenever possible.

Herald Tribune columnist John Crosby reviewed it and two other summer replacement shows in his column of July 10, 1946. Bob Sweeney was a well-thought of television director in later years but at the time he was in a comedy team with Hal March, noted more for The $64,000 Question than his acting. CBS gave them a show. The third replacement was a game show that was now on ABC after airing on the Mutual network. Break the Bank starred the overly-effervescent Bert Parks, who soon took his hype to another ABC radio show, Stop the Music. Break the Bank made the transition to television. It featured prize questions that a child of five could answer but adult game show contestants couldn’t, as Crosby notes.

Three New Radio Shows
At the outset of his new program, “Kiss and Make Up” (WABC 9 p. m. Mondays), Milton Berle went on at some length about his experiences at the beach.
“Honestly, the bathing suits these girls wear,” he said. “Midriff. All mid and no riff. The lifeguard has to rescue one girl from drowning. The girl screamed twice—once because he was drowning.”
That should give you some idea of Mr. Berle, who hasn’t changed a bit since his vaudeville days. In “Kiss and Make Up,” Mr. Berle plays judge in a sort of domestic relations court. On Monday night, a couple was brought before him both insisting that the other one snored so loudly that sleep was impossible.
“You mean he’s sleeping on the inside and snoring on the outside?” inquired Mr. Berle.
After a bit more of this patter, the couple are asked to kiss and make up, hence the title of the show. The program is supposed to be ad lib, but I have grave doubts about that. One woman complained that another woman heard her order liver on the party line and then rushed down and got the liver herself.
“I got her liver, but she got my gall,” said the other female. If that’s an ad-lib, I’m John J. Anthony. From where I sat I could see the beads of perspiration on the gag writer’s brow when he dreamed that up. I’m not a Milton Berle fan, but if you like puns, you’ll hear more in five minutes on this show than in an hour and a half of Eddie Cantor.
* * *
Some time ago I remarked that a good comedian makes a half hour fly past while a poor one makes a half hour seem twice that long. I had another long half hour on Friday night, while listening to “Sweeney and March” on their new comedy act (WABC 8:30 p. m. Fridays). In this case I think the reason is that they crammed enough material into a half an hour to make two or three shows.
The program opened with one comedian talking the other one out of going to the seashore on his vacation and invites himself to go to the mountains. Then there is a sketch up in the mountains, the trip back from the mountains, and the half hour ended with another sketch about buying a used car. Any one of those sketches would have made a good half hour if treated with a little wit, but lumping them all together made the program seem endless. The program also presents Patsy Bolton, fourteen-year-old singer, who tripped through “Great Day” with a suavity far greater than her years.
As a sample of the humor on the Sweeney and March program I seem to have only one joke on my notes, though I’m sure they must have told more than that. Here it is:
“Can I get a prescription filled here.”
“Certainly not, this is a drug store.”
* * *
If you want to make some easy money you might want to try to get on the “Break the Bank” program (WJZ, 9 p. m., Fridays). This is a new quiz show with a $1,070 top prize, but I advise against trying for the whole sum. It’s a cinch to make $200 or $300.
Some of the questions asked last Friday were: “What famous document proclaimed the independence of the United States?” “Who was first in peace, first in war and first in the hearts of his countrymen?” “What is the first love song you remember?” On that last question any love song that pops into your mind serves as an answer.
The jumbo question which would have won the contestant $1,070 was: “Where was the first atomic bomb exploded?” I thought every one had heard about the New Mexico test explosion, but the contestant apparently missed his newspaper that day. He retired from the program with just $10 for his previous answers.

As we’ve promised, we’ll give you the full week’s worth of Crosby’s columns. You can click on them to see them better. July 8, 1946 was about a drama starring Orson Welles on CBS. July 9th has Crosby nodding in affirmation at the cattiness of the Mutual programme Leave it to the Girls. July 11th has Crosby mulling over three different shows, while July 12th’s column focuses on a couple of women’s programmes, one on local New York radio.

Musical Spaghetti

Pluto hasn’t been invented yet, so Mickey pulls out the teeth of his 1929 pooch and opens a can of spaghetti in Mickey’s Choo Choo. Carl Stalling plays “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” in the background.



Mickey then plays “Humoresque” on the spaghetti like a harp (Disney turns from public domain standards to public domain classics) before it slaps him in the face. No, he doesn’t share the spaghetti with the dog.



Ub Iwerks gets a “by” credit; I imagine he did the scene with the train belching after dinner.

The Eyes of Louie

Greedy Louie realises he’ll be a millionaire if he bumps off dopey cat Heathcliff in Dough Ray Me-ow, a 1948 cartoon by the Art Davis unit at Warners.



Here’s animator Don Williams at work with his multiple eyes and brushwork. Louie imagines the money, then imagines the money with him replacing Heathcliff.



Bill Melendez, Basil Davidovich and Emery Hawkins also animate scenes, with the story credited to Lloyd Turner.

Saving Money the Benny Way

Last week, we reprinted an article about Jack Benny from a weekend newspaper magazine of November 2, 1958. Here’s an indication how popular Jack was—the same magazine had another feature story about him the following weekend.

Here, Jack is in character doing a cheapskate advice routine. We suspect it was penned by one of his writers.

Penny For My Thoughts?
BY JACK BENNY
I am not what is known as a voluble man, but concerning certain subjects I seldom find myself at a loss for words. I consider myself an authority on antique cars, valets, violin solos and money. The last has always appealed to me especially the problem of keeping it.
Along these lines, I have formed a certain set of operating procedures which I will be happy to pass along.

Capricious buying should be avoided at all—you’ll pardon the expression—cost. Never, in a weak moment, allow yourself to purchase something on a whim. This may prove difficult for the neophyte, as all the guile and craftiness of merchants are directed at just such weak-willed persons. Signs and advertisements drip with sentimental suggestions like Buy your sweetheart a box of Goodie Chocolate.
It's The Thought
A nice card and a candy bar will serve just as well. After all, it’s not the money but the thought which counts, and a card and a candy bar makes you properly sentimental without overdoing it.
Never pick up luncheon or dinner checks at a restaurant, club, or night spot. And I mean that literally. Once I picked up a check out of simple curiosity. I had no intention of paying it, but by the time I had added the figures everyone had gone and I had to pay or wash the dishes. If I’d had my rubber gloves along I think I’d have chosen the dishes.
Now from time to time, even if you follow the above advice, someone will push a check toward you. At this point, you have several possible courses of action. Providing you haven’t drunk your glass of water you can knock it over, and in attempting to dry out the tablecloth, once again push the check across the table.
At times this is impractical, for instance if the table is slanting toward you. However, suddenly remembering you must make a telephone call can extricate you from such a position, as can a sudden desire for cigarets, a newspaper, or a just-remembered appointment, to which you must rush.
Only Showoffs Pay
I would like to make it perfectly clear that I am not cheap. It’s just that I detest ostentation in anyone, particularly myself. Check grabbers are such showoffs.
Another difficult situation a man may find himself facing is how to avoid paying for a round of drinks at his golf club. I have found that by being a step or two behind my friends someone always pays for the first round. The second is fought over and the third, etc., until everyone but me has paid.
That pretty well takes care of the ground rules for thrift involving outright expenditures. The delicate, subtle ways of saving money is what separates the men from the boys. However, I haven’t time to go into such detail, so I will leave you with my slogan for thrift, A Penny Saved Is a Penny Earned.

Walter Lantz Keeps On Going

Walter Lantz finally shut down his cartoon studio in 1972, even though he said at the time there was still international demand for his shorts. Evidently, theatres didn’t care how bad the cartoons were. Woody Woodpecker was a wasted shell of himself and the less said about the Beary Family, the better.

Apparently, Lantz considered getting out of the cartoon business in 1962 but changed his mind. That’s what he told columnist Joan Dew in the Valley Times of North Hollywood. This short piece was published on April 20, 1963. As Lantz still had a contract with Universal-International, it’s doubtful the studio would have closed.

The Woody creation story hadn’t yet morphed to include the “honeymoon” claim, which was as real as any of Lantz’s cartoon characters. The “udder” story about the Lantz studio showed up in a New York newspaper in March 1931, so he’d been telling it a long time.

Walter Lantz Retired Once--For Two Weeks
At 63, Walter Lantz has as much energy as his precocious offspring, Woody Woodpecker.
He retired a year ago; and his retirement lasted all of two weeks. "I couldn't stand it," he says, "so I returned to work."
In addition to actively supervising his bustling studio, which turns out several dozen motion picture cartoons a year, he is an enthusiastic golfer, a world traveler and a talented painter.
HE LOST many of his landscapes in oil when his home burned in the Bel Air fire. He has painted 15 since then and decided to have them appraised in case of fire or theft. "I've never been so astonished," he told me, "as I was when the appraiser valued them at $200 to $500 each.
"I paint from colored slides my wife and I take when we travel. Our maid has never thought much of me as a painter, and she doesn't hesitate to tell me so. But she gave me one compliment recently. I had completed a scene from Holland of a windmill. She saw it and said, 'Mr. Lantz, that one isn't bad. I recognize it. It's Van de Camp's.' "

WALTER'S wife is Grace Stafford, a former actress, who is the voice of Woody Woodpecker.
"When AFTRA went on strike a couple of years ago, Gracie was on strike against me," Walter laughed. "I punished her by making her pick up her own dinner tabs."
Walter entered the cartoon industry at its inception. The year was 1916 and he worked under the late Gregory La Cava. But it wasn't until 1940 that Woody, his most famous character, was born. Walter was living at Lake Sherwood, Calif., and a pesky woodpecker almost destroyed the roof of his home. "That $200 roof bill became the best investment of my life," he says.
Since Walter's cartoons are made especially for motion pictures, each six-minute short must be approved by the Johnson Office and awarded a Purity Seal before being released to distributors.
"THAT'S NOT as simple as it sounds," he pointed out, "because of the requirements involved. For example, if we're going to show a cow, we must draw a skirt on it. Children are not supposed to see the udders."
"You can't be serious," I said.
"Oh, yes," he laughed, "then when it gets to the theater, they put it on the bill with something like 'Lolita.' "
Although Walter and his wife have no children of their own, they are god parents to many. For 10 years they have been sponsors of a Sherman Oaks Little League baseball team and they founded the Woody Woodpecker Foundation, which gives financial aid to boys' clubs throughout the country.
"Associating with youngsters keeps me young," says Walter. "I'm producing a new television show this fall that will combine my motion picture cartoons with an educational format. In order to know what will be interesting to kids, you have to know how they think, and learn the trick of entering their world."
Walter seems to have mastered the trick. I don't know a child who gets more of a kick out of life than he does. In fact, when we parted, it was much like a scene from a Walter Lantz cartoon. He hopped into his sleek '63 Corvette Sting Ray, gunned the motor and raced away.

Hail to Bendover

Pete Hothead (Jerry Hausner) listens outside the Bendover and Grovel department store where Avery the floorwalker (Jim Backus) is leading employees in their pre-opening singing devotion to the store.



Marian Richman and Bill Scott provide additional voices ijn Pete Hothead. Scott co-wrote the cartoon and I suspect he came up with the names “Marmaduke” and “Chauncy.” Pete Burness directed this 1954 UPA short.