No. 1 Jack

Besides the big-name gossip columnists working for various syndicates, the wire services had entertainment reporters, too, though they tended to write profiles, reviews or talk about current projects with the stars. At one time, the Associated Press had Charles Mercer and Wayne Oliver in New York, and Bob Thomas and Cynthia Lowry in Hollywood. United Press International had Fred Danzig and William Ewald in New York, and Vernon Scott and Aline Mosby (later Rick DuBrow) in Hollywood.

All of them, I’m pretty certain, interviewed Jack Benny on more than one occasion. Here’s a column by Oliver published February 9, 1955. In looking it over, Jack isn’t quoted at all. It’s more of a review with some facts tossed in. There’s little new. Jack works a lot and has good ratings.

At 60, Benny's Ambition Makes Some Think He's 39
By WAYNE OLIVER
NEW YORK (AP) — A youngster by the name of Jack Benny who takes television in a breeze must confound some of the older comics who are in and out of hospitals with video fatigue.
Nearly 23 years after he first took to the air. Jack continues a weekly radio show that currently is No. 1 in the ratings and takes a turn on TV every second week. Jack has moved to seventh among the American Research Bureau’s ten most popular shows. I Love Lucy, seen Monday nights at 9, still ranks as No. 1.
While many comics are considering a cutback in the frequency of their appearances, Benny is pondering the possibility of stepping his video visits up to one a week next season. His contemporaries must wonder if he isn't serious after all about being only 39.
Even on his occasional filmed TV shows, such as last Sunday night’s program, Benny's performances seem as relaxed and spontaneous as a first rehearsal although his superb timing must require plenty of practice and polish. Benny and his writers also have the knack of mixing the believeable and the ridiculous to get a blend of pure fun.
Sunday night, for example, Benny's experience in being wakened by the telephone at 4 a.m. was one that has happened to most viewers. On the other extreme was his wonder at the unusual visibility in the early morning in Los Angeles that enabled him to see the Statue of Liberty without his glasses and the Eiffel Tower when he put them on.
Benny was already a show business veteran when he made his first radio broadcast in March, 1932, as a guest on a CBS program. He became master of ceremonies on a weekly NBC radio show in May, 1932, and in October the same year started his full comedy routine.
Benny switched from NBC to CBS radio Jan. 2, 1949, as a result of a famous capital gains deal reportedly involving $2,260,000.
The Waukegan Wit made his TV debut on CBS Oct. 28, 1950, but limited himself to six appearances the first season. He stepped it up to every sixth week the next season, every fourth week the one after that, every third week last season and every second week this season.
For the record, Benny will be 61 next Monday, Valentine Day.

Newspapers could spike wire service columns for use when they wanted, so this particular column may not have appeared on February 9th. For example, some papers on February 8th ran an Oliver story on Charles McGraw. Others ran a review of NBC’s “The Women.” Another published a column about Leontyne Price that had been published elsewhere the day before. Newspapers were not beholden to use any of the wire material; it was there if necessary, especially for smaller papers, to be chopped to fit space requirements.

However, if you’ve been reading the blog for some time, you’ll notice a wealth of wire service columns and feature stories about Jack Benny. That’s what happens when you’re Number One.

Phrases and Words and Newscasts

Saturday mornings, at least for me back in the 1960s, were for fun. They were a break and a rest from five days a week of school. I didn’t want school on weekends, too. I wanted to see George Jetson bumble around in reruns, or Bugs Bunny put one over Yosemite Sam dressed as a pirate or a knight of olde or a desert sheik.

But do-gooder groups thought education was just fine on Saturday mornings. And while they caused the bowdlerisation of new cartoon series, they also forced some creative ideas to come to the forefront to teach kids stuff that may have bored them at school.

I enjoyed the CBS “In the News” featurettes. It wasn’t much of a stretch from the short newsbreaks on the network during weekday afternoons, Christopher Glenn had a smooth, credible sound and I was not far away from starting a radio news career.

The “Schoolhouse Rock” segments on ABC didn’t interest me as much. They were designed for a pre-teen audience. There were a lot of Americanisms. And they were shown over and over and over and over. They were good to get something to eat. No childhood nostalgia for me about them. But watching them now, I can appreciate the creativity that went into them.

It’s not often that newspaper columnists write about Saturday morning programming, other than to bash it for violence or poor taste or banality. But the Associated Press’ Jay Sharbutt put something together before they began a second season and urged parents to watch them. The column is from Wednesday, Sept. 5, 1973.

ABC’s ‘Scholastic Rock’ Sets Grammar, Math to Music
By JAY SHARBUTT
AP Television Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — One of the briefest, hippest kid shows on television—ABC’s “Scholastic Rock”—will start some swinging grammar lessons next Saturday morning It already has put a lively beat to basic math.
The new lessons are in ‘‘Grammar Rock,” a companion series to the 11 “Multiplication Rock" segments that have been part of ABC’s Saturday and Sunday morning childrens’ programming since Jan. 6.
The method of both series is simple but highly effective: The usually dull rules of multiplication and grammar are written as catchy lyrics to pop music with cartoon characters moving about briskly to illustrate the number or rule of grammar involved.
Each show lasts only 3½ minutes, but you might try to catch one some morning. They’re excellent. The music is billed as rock, but It really isn’t. It’s more in the jazz vein.
Several of the singers behind the cartoon characters are respected jazz artists, albeit not as widely known as some of today’s pop music stars.
The "Multiplication Rock" team consists of Blossom Dearie, an excellent pianist; jazz drummer-vocalist Grady Tate; and pianist Bobby Dorough, who composed all the multiplication songs.
Another well-known figure in jazz circles—trumpeter Jack Sheldon—sings in the new grammar series according to spokesmen for Scholastic Rock, Inc., the New York-based producers of both shows.
Segments from both series will air five times each Saturday and twice on Sunday, according to ABC, which says yet another “Scholastic Rock” series—dealing with American government and history—may be ordered up at a later date.
Another project aimed at young viewers is in the works right now at CBS-TV. It involves current news items and an effort to put these stories into perspective for the 10- to 16-year-old viewer.
CBS says the shows, each running nearly two minutes, will start in October, run Monday through Friday and examine one current story a day with detailed but easy-to-follow background material on it.

I may not be nostalgic about the “Schoolhouse” featurettes, but some people of a later generation are. Saturday Night Live parodied “I’m Just a Bill” while a musical based on the shorts was put together with a three-man, three-woman cast in 1993. A version hit the stage in Poughkeepsie, New York in 2000. Columnist Dana Anhalt explained in the Millbrook Round Table how they came about.

Many of us remember waking up on Saturday mornings, planting ourselves in front of the television for a hearty dose of our favorite cartoon programs and watching those catchy little "Schoolhouse Rock" vignettes during the breaks (that is, if we happened to be in our Saturday morning cartoon prime anywhere from 1973-1985).
In the early 1970s, advertising executive David McCall was concerned that his son was having trouble memorizing his multiplication tables, but at the same time he could effortlessly spew forth the lyrics to every pop song on the radio. To McCall, the solution seemed obvious: Why not marry pop music with information that kids need to learn?
With the fusion of these two elements came the pop-culture phenomenon known to us as "Schoolhouse Rock." McCall worked with creative directors at his ad agency to come up with scripts and storyboards. They hired jazz pianist Bob Dorough to compose a song based on the multiplication tables, and the result was "Three is a Magic Number." The concept was quickly snatched up by Michael Eisner, head of ABC's children's programming at the time, and other "Schoolhouse Rock" cartoons came soon after, each with their own delightfully infectious tune and entertaining animation. They cover a wide range of topics including history, grammar, math, science, government and finance (basically, anything an elementary school child would otherwise dread). The outcome: children walking around singing (brace yourself) EDUCATIONAL LYRICS!

Whether the little cartoons are still airing somewhere other than being posted on a video website, I don’t know, but why not put them back on TV when they hit their 50th birthday in 2023? There’s a gaping need to teach American kids about bills, and phrases and words and clauses.

The Magic Fluke Background

An opening pan of the nightclub scene off Broadway opens The Magic Fluke, the second UPA cartoon designed for theatrical release. “Club Bobo” is in honour of Bobe Cannon, one of the animators of this 1949 short.



Herb Klynn, Jules Engel and Bill Hurtz handled layouts and backgrounds. The voice of the narrating crow is an uncredited John T. Smith.

Crying at the Coo Coo Nut Grove

Friz Freleng pans up in The Coo Coo Nut Grove (1936) and it turns out we’re seeing Helen Morgan crying while singing Warren/Dubin’s “The Little Things You Used To Do.”



The gag topper is the nightclub is so deep in tears, celebrities are on top of tables that float away. (Freleng liked post-scripts in gags. In this one, after the tables have floated out of the scene, a George Arliss turtle rows from left to right while on the back of his shell.



What’s a little odd in this cartoon is some of the celebrities are human, others are animalised versions. (Foreground: Laurel and Hardy, Wallace Beery. Background: Katharine Hepburn and W.C. Fields, Groucho in drag and Harpo).

Sandy Walker and Bob McKimson are the credited animators. The celebrities were designed by Thornton Hee just before he got a job with Walt Disney.

Hale and Hale

It’s like they wanted to pretend it wasn’t there.

Alan Hale was available for interviews before and after the debut of Gilligan’s Island. Syndicated columnists didn’t ask him about the show—instead, they wrote stories saying “Gee, he looks just like his dad.”

Erskine Johnson of NEA did it. Hank Grant of the Hollywood Reporter did it. Vernon Scott of UPI did it. Bob Thomas of the AP touched on it, too.

It’s probably because the series got dumped on over and over again by critics. Cynthia Lowry of the Associated Press proclaimed “It is positively the worst new program in a season full of mediocre entries.” This was the “vast wasteland” era of the S.S. Newton Minow. He assailed TV for being too low-brow. The idea of escapist silliness was completely foreign to him and the critics. Because that’s what Gilligan’s Island is. It didn’t pretend to be anything else.

We’ll skip the Johnson and Grant columns. Here’s Scott’s for United Press International, June 7, 1965.



Young Hale still confused with father, dead 15 years
By VERNON SCOTT
HOLLYWOOD (UPI) — Alan Hale, the rotund skipper of "Gilligan's Island," bears a remarkable resemblance to his late father and, curiously, acknowledges that he still is in competition with his dad.
"I look so much like him that people think my father is still alive," says Hale.
"And he is seen by millions of people on the late movies, which has kept him alive in the minds of the public. The nice thing about it is that my youngsters are able to see their grandfather although they never knew him in life."
Hale Sr. died 15 years ago. And until eight years ago his son continued to be billed as Alan Hale Jr. How that he's dropped the Jr. the confusion between father and son has increased.
The confusion is heightened because Hale's role in the CBS-TV series is precisely the bungling kind of comedy role the senior Hale played so often during his lifetime. Like his father, Alan is a huge, bluff man, easy going and a popular figure in Hollywood.
He and his wife, Naomi, live in a small frame Hollywood bungalow. It's a little old-fashioned place on a quiet, unpretentious street. The furniture is comfortable and unspectacular.
Mrs. Hale weighs less than 100 pounds and provides a striking contrast to her husband's bulk. He calls her Trinket.
"The house isn't large by Hollywood standards," he says. "But it has a lovely little garden and a big fireplace. It's our castle and we love it."
On weekends the castle is crowded with voting Hales by a previous marriage. The youngsters are Alan Brian, 16; Chris, 13; Lana, 12; and Dorian, 9. Of his only daughter, Hale says, "Her name is Alan (Lana) spelled inside out — a sop to my ego."
The children live with father and mother and attend school in the San Fernando Valley.
For all his fame as an actor, Hale might as well be a plumber or a landscape gardener. He is not even on the fringes of movietown's "in" set. He has no status symbols.
He chugs to work each morning through the canyons to Studio Center in a 1954 Cadillac which the entire family calls Old Blue Boy. Trinket clunks along in a 1951 Dodge dubbed the Gray Streak.
"We love our old cars," Hale grins. "They're like personalities to us. They perk along with no trouble at all.
Both Hales are golf nuts. He is a member of The Hackers, a group of amateur golfers who play on various links around the country. But the demands of the series have cut into Alan's game. He has ballooned from a 5 handicap to a 12.
Hale's real avocation can easily be determined by the size of his girth. He fancies himself a talented chef.
"I used to be a camera bug with a dark room and all that," he says. "But when I started using color film I gave it all up—and found out I still had the creative urge to take raw materials and tarn them into something useful and different. So I turned to cooking."
Probably to Trinket's relief, Hale does most of the cooking when the children visit on weekends.
He uses them for experiments.
“I’ll try a new recipe, making it up as I go along,” he laughs. "If they like It, I keep improving the dish. If they don't, I drop the project and try another recipe."
Hale's specialties are potato soup, spaghetti dishes and casseroles.
So far the kids have survived. And Alan's bulk is sufficient proof that he, at least, thrives on his own cooking.
A native California, Hale dresses the part. He almost always can be found in sports shirts and slacks. Even when a tie is required Alan sticks to blazers and informal garb. He may be the only television star who rents a tuxedo for formal functions.
The name Hale may continue to find its way onto screen credits in the next generation. Young Dorian already has taken a screen test, and his proud father says: "He looks like a real comer."

Bob Thomas of the Associated Press penned this for editions of January 2, 1965. He avoids any comment on the series other than it was getting good ratings.

Three Strikes.. A Hit
By BOB THOMAS
AP Movie-Television Writer
HOLLYWOOD (AP) — For Alan Hale it looks as if the third time makes the charm.
The hefty, extroverted actor, who fitted neatly into his father's footsteps as a jolly, capable character actor, has been at bat three times in the television game. The first venture was "Biff Baker."
That lasted merely a season. Later came "Casey Jones" for Screen Gems. "There was a lapse of a year between the pilot and the series," Alan recalls. "I saw the producer once during that time — and it was the only time I ever saw him."
Again, a season's run.
Alan joined Bob Denver, Jim Backus, Tina Louise and other castaways on "Gilligan's Island," and this time the ratings indicate he has picked a winner.
"I think people enjoy it," said Alan. "They seem to appreciate a show that has no problems — just fun." And he's not at all displeased that some folks have been comparing him and Bob Denver to Laurel and Hardy.
It has been a half-dozen years since Alan dropped the junior off his billing. He did so not to escape the image of his father famed as the jolly sidekick of Errol Flynn in numerous adventure films. Unlike some second-generation actors, young Alan doesn't fight the comparison with his father.
"I always remember what my grandfather told me one day," he recalled. "We were out in the backyard of our Hollywood house and he said, 'What's that?' I asked him, 'What's what?' 'That — behind you,' he said. I said, 'Oh, that's my shadow,' and he replied, 'Don't ever lose it.' In other words: find my own place in the sun."
The quest was not always simple. In the postwar years when movie business was slack, Alan took a number of outside jobs, including a four-year stretch selling vacuum cleaners.
"That was the best education an actor could possibly have," he commented. "Every front porch was like opening night.
"I had some great experiences. One night another salesman and I were making some calls when we came upon a big party in the valley where only one person spoke English; the rest all spoke Spanish. Well, we were invited in for refreshments and by the time we left we had sold four vacuum cleaners."
Despite promise of a distributorship, Alan returned to acting as soon as his fortunes improved, and he's likely to stay in it as long as his Pa did.
"Funny thing," he reflected, "with his old movies on television, I guess I'm in competition with him. That's okay with me. He was the greatest."

Hale’s identity problem was caused by reruns and solved by reruns. When Gilligan first appeared, Hale’s dad was on the small screen on shows running old movies. Eventually, they were replaced with newer films. Meanwhile, the S.S. Minnow was launched into daily syndication where it remained for years (and is probably still playing somewhere). Alan Hale may have become the Skipper to TV fans, but he became his own man, too.

Jolly Roger Speaks

A pirate flag uses its own bones as telescopes in the 1935 Ub Iwerks ComiColor short Sinbad the Sailor.



The Iwerks ubiquitous radiating lines appear.



The skull turns to the pirate and says something I cannot understand.



This passed for a gag at the Iwerks studio.

Some of the animation is good and there are some imaginative directoral touches (panning into characters, overhead shots) but anyone who thinks this is close in quality to the Fleischer Sindbad two-reeler released the same year has been yo-ho-ho-ing too much rum.

The Eyes Have It

A pair of eyes do a little travelling to get a closer look at The Lady That’s Known as Lou in The Shooting of Dan McGoo, a Tex Avery cartoon released in 1945.



Having been told off by the Mae West-sounding Lou (played by Sara Berner), the eyes turn around and jump from the table back into the wolf’s sockets (wolf played by Frank Graham).



Ed Love, Preston Blair and Ray Abrams are the credited animators. Bill Thompson was on war duty in the Midwest so other than an archival piece of audio, someone else is voicing him. I think that’s Pat McGeehan as the piano player.

Life of Benny

It’s a long journey from being kicked out of school to becoming a loved entertainer for decades. But that’s the journey Jack Benny went on.

Cosmopolitan magazine was no gushy fan rag. It profiled Jack in a lengthy article in October 1947, interviewing friends and colleagues, and painting a portrait of a man could be moody, not particularly interested in current affairs, and someone who, as they put it then, was “fresh” as a teenager.

Below is the second half of the article. It has perhaps the best account—and probably not known to many in 1947—of the evolution of the Benny radio show and his unpleasant split with his writer, Harry Conn. Interestingly, the story says that “nobody was impressed by Jack’s debut” on the Ed Sullivan show (it wasn’t his debut, but that’s beside the point). Someone must have been impressed, as it’s conceded that Benny was put on the new Canada Dry radio show because of it, if indeed that’s what happened (George Olsen told a different story later in life, taking credit for Benny’s hiring).

Correctly, it points out the evolution of Rochester’s character. And, if accurate, the Jack-Mary courtship took place rather quickly.

The “Japs or better” line was coined by Goody Ace. The line isn’t exactly a “goody” today.

The Fiddler From Waukegan
By MAURICE ZOLOTOW
THE MAN who was to accomplish the feat of putting Waukegan, Illinois, an obscure town of less than thirty-five thousand population, on the national map, was actually born in Chicago, Illinois, on February 14, 1894. Benny's parents lived in Waukegan, but his mother, Emma, insisted on going to Chicago for the birth of her first child. "When people ask my child where he was born, I want him to say he was born in Chicago," she said. A week after he was born he was named Benjamin Kubelsky and two months later he was taken back to Waukegan. His father was a former peddler of kitchenware who had later owned a saloon in Waukegan and had just emharked on a small haberdashery enterprise on South Genesee Street. Kubelsky was not a very aggressive businessman, and his family was one of the poorest in Waukegan. Nonetheless, when Benjamin was six years old, his father bought him a fiddle for one hundred dollars—which represented the family savings for a year—and put him under the tutelage of Charles Lindsay, the town's best music teacher, who charged one dollar an hour for lessons.
By the time he was eight, Benny was playing the violin with Farmer's Orchestra, a six-piece combination, which appeared at weddings and parties given by Waukegan's aristocracy. By 1906, when he was twelve years old, Benjamin was playing every night in the pit band at the Barrison Theatre. His musical precocity was the talk of Waukegan, and a group of the town's leading citizens wanted to raise a fund to further his musical education by sending him to a conservatory in New York and then to Europe, but the boy preferred to remain at home.
It became evident, at a very early age, that Benjamin had no future in the mercantile line. Once, when he was minding the shop while his father had dinner, a man came in and gave Benjamin some money.
"What did you sell?" his father asked later.
"Nothing," the boy replied. "He just gave me some money on his account."
"Account? Account? What account? What's his name?"
"I don't know," Benjamin said. "Gee, do you have to have his name?"
One Saturday morning, a customer came in and ordered some shirts and ties and socks and walked out without paying any cash.
"It's all right," Benjamin said triumphantly.
"He said to charge it to his account. And this time I got his name!"
"His name! His name! Why he ain't got no account in my store. I never saw that man before in my life."
When she heard of the incident, Mrs. Kubelsky, who seems to have been the family wit, sighed and said to her husband, "Well, Meyer, plumbing is a good business too!"
In school, young Kubelsky was considered one of the freshest as well as one of the dumbest pupils. His English teacher, Alice Payne, once ordered him to leave the classroom because he was talking. There was to be a dance at the Parish House that night, and Farmer's Orchestra was providing the syncopation. As Benny walked out of the class, he turned to his teacher and said, "Alice, don't forget to save me a dance tonight."
He was expelled from the school orchestra, where he played first violin, because when the orchestra was rehearsing Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony," he loudly remarked that the Waukegan High School Orchestra was certainly going to finish that symphony, all right, all right.
Sent to the principal's office once for disciplinary treatment, he offered to make peace with the principal by giving him a pass to the Barrison Theatre. When the principal presented the pass, he was informed that the pass was for the previous week and that it was no good.
In his sophomore year, Benjamin was expelled from high school, and in 1912, he broke into vaudeville. Cora Salisbury, the pianist at the Barrison Theatre, who was many years older than he and who had once done a solo routine in vaudeville, proposed that they form a team. They plotted out a novelty musical ad and got some bookings. His parents were violently opposed to his going into the theater. They felt it was a disgrace. Benny pointed out that his educational possibilities were dim, that he had no ability at running a store, and that the future for a violinist in Waukegan was very limited.
The act was called Salisbury and Benny, because there was a noted concert violinist at that time by the name of Jan Kubelik, and the vaudeville circuit was afraid there might be some confusion. The act played split weeks in the family-time circuit of the middle West. They received fifty dollars a week, with Benny getting fifteen.
After two seasons, Miss Salisbury decided to retire. Benny teamed up with a Chicago pianist, Lyman Woods. This time Benny got top billing and Woods received the fifteen-dollar short end of the fifty-dollar-a-week salary. The act was billed as "From Grand Opera to Ragtime," and it opened with a classical medley that always included the "Poet and Peasant Overture" and a Brahms Hungarian Dance. Then Benny did a solo, playing a very mournful interpretation of "The Rosary," bathed in an amber spotlight. 'Woods did a piano solo, a Chopin Polonaise. Then the duo rattled off a ragtime tune in lively fashion and finished with a medley of popular songs like "Oh, You Beautiful Doll" and "Everybody's Doin' It." Neither Benny nor Woods did any speaking. But, during the lighter numbers, Benny got into the habit of pantomiming or raising a little finger when he played a graceful bar of music or acting as if he were under a big strain when he was playing a difficult passage. These little touches always got laughs.
Gradually, Benny and Woods worked up to the better circuits, the Gus Sun Circuit, the Western Vaudeville Circuit, the Pantages, and finally the Orpheum, which was the big time. In 1916, their career culminated in the dream of every vaudevillian—a week's booking at the Palace Theatre on Broadway. They were now getting two hundred and fifty dollars a week. But they were a dismal flop. They received such bad notices and so little applause that they almost lost a year's bookings. Benny and Woods was strictly a small-town act.
When war came in 1917, Benny enlisted in the United States Navy and was sent to boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. Having listed his profession as "musician" he was assigned to the band. The bandmaster was annoyed when he found Bern1y played a fiddle. The bandmaster had no use for strings and asked Benny if he could quickly master a flute or a piccolo. Benny's reply was to ask for an easy assignment, like swabbing the deck of a battleship. At this point, some of the sailors got together and decided to stage a show for the men. They got a recreation hall and one after another, each of them did a bit. Benny played some violin selections and was greeted by boos and whistling.
Pat O'Brien, who later became an actor, was in the show, and he whispered to Benny, "For heaven's sake, put down that fiddle and talk." In desperation Benny said to the audience: "I was having an argument with Pat O'Brien about the Irish navy this morning." A wave of chuckling went through the audience. Benny thereupon ad libbed a series of zany comments about life at Great Lakes and interspersed them with a few bars on the violin.
When the Great Lakes Revue, a nautical equivalent of Irving Berlin's "Yip Yip Yaphank" was put together, Benny Kubelsky found himself playing the comedy role of the "Admiral’s Disorderly, Izzy There." Besides playing in several sketches he also did a humorous piano-and-fiddle act with a fellow sailor, Elzear Confrey, later known to fame as Zez Confrey, who during the 1920’s composed Kitten on the Keys" and "Stumbling."
After the armistice, Benny returned to vaudeville and bought some gags from a writer named Al Boasberg. His act was now called Ben K. Benny: Fiddle Funology, and consisted of ragtime tunes and comedy effects on the violin (such as imitating the squeals of a cat or a pig), With a few gags thrown in, Benny was developing his stage presence and his timing. Audiences loved his trick of rolling his eyes around in a droll manner when he got off something excruciating on his violin. In show-business circles, Benny was considered an imitator of Ben Bernie, then a star on the Orpheum Circuit, who had been doing a talking-and-fiddle act for years. Broadway people even thought that Benny had deliberately chosen his name to deceive the customers. So he decided to change his name to Jack Benny.
The act was now "Jack Benny: Fun with a Fiddle." And it finally became simply, "A Few Minutes With Jack Benny." As time went on, Benny played the fiddle less and less, and spoke more and more. Finally, he ceased to play the violin altogether, but he continued to hold it under his arm to give himself courage. In vaudeville, Benny was generally considered to have the smartest, subtlest, suavest act. A reviewer in the Times once called him "The most civilized act in vaudeville." He never played for vulgar belly laughs. He stood on the stage expressing unhurried ease and exuding great self-confidence. He almost seemed to feel that nothing mattered very much. As he spoke, in a slow and bored fashion, he would fix his tie, or straighten his breastpocket handkerchief or pick invisible bits of dust off his suit. He didn't seem at all to care for the fact that there was an audience out there. Abel Green, editor of Variety, says, "Benny's delivery in vaudeville was one of the first examples of modern throw-away technique."
Benny's opening line, which he used for years, was celebrated. He would casually lope toward the center of the stage, tuck his violin under his arm, brush his hair back with his left hand, and inquire of the maestro, "How is the show?"
"Fine up to now," the maestro would reply.
"I'll fix that!" Benny would say.
Benny's deliberately cultivated suavity on the stage concealed an almost irrational terror of an audience. But nobody watching him ever realized that he was trembling inside and that every line he spoke and every piece of business he did required an effort of will power.
In 1924 he finally achieved the Palace again and was a sensation because his sophisticated routine delighted the hardboiled Palace audience. He was moved to the best spot, next to closing. The Schuberts signed him for a 1925 revue, "The Great Temptations." He did a twelve-minute monologue just before the end of the first act on opening night. He was so petrified with stage fright that he didn't even know what he was saying and didn't hear the applause. When Robert Benchley reviewed the show in the old Life magazine, he praised Jack Benny's performance and said he had never seen such savoir faire on a stage and wondered how a newcomer like Benny could act so blasé.
Around 1927, he became a vaudeville master of ceremonies. He walked on and off during all the other acts and in between the acts, and he introduced each act with a flippant comment. One of his famous remarks occurred at the Palace, when Long Tack Sam, a Chinese magician, opened the bill. After Long Tack Sam made his exit, Benny wandered on stage and drawled, "Vaudeville has certainly changed. I can remember when it took Japs or better to open!"
But in vaudeville Jack Benny was never one of the top-ranking stars. He never earned above two hundred and fifty dollars a week until 1932 when he played the Palace at a substantial increase. Benny's act was caviar to the general and a good many theaters never played him at all because their audiences didn’t think he was amusing.
Often, he would go to see his agent, Tom Fitzpatrick, and there would be no work at all for him. Once things got so desperate that when Fitzpatrick got a call from a theater manager in New Jersey, offering twenty-five dollars for an animal act, Benny said he would take the job. He borrowed two Pekingese dogs from the wife of an actor friend and took them to New Jersey. When he made his entrance he tied the dogs to a piece of scenery and proceeded to tell stories and play some tunes on his fiddle. The audience applauded hirn, and the manager said it was a peculiar sort of animal act, but he paid Benny the twenty-five dollars. As Jack was leaving, the manager blurted, "Mister, don't your dogs do any tricks?”
"Not at these prices," murmured Jack serenely, pocketing the money.
When Benny was in Los Angeles with the road company of "The Great Temptations," in 1926, he visited at the home of a girl, Fifi Marks, whom he had known in vaudeville. Fifi had a vivacious younger sister, Sadye, a black-haired, black-eyed, sharp-tongued girl, who worked as a clerk in a department store.
However, Benny, who was never the sparkling-conversationalist type, did not have much to say to Sadye. He just looked at her. A few weeks later the phone rang in the Marks household at two o'clock in the morning. Mrs. Marks answered it, woke Sadye and said that there was some crazy man telephoning from Canada. It was Jack Benny. Sadye asked him why he had called in the middle of the night, and he replied that he had been thinking of her just then and wanted to say hello. "Is that ALL?" she cried.
A few months later, when "The Great Temptations" was playing Chicago, Sadye was visiting friends there, and Jack had a date with her. He said nothing of his intentions. He took her to meet his father in Waukegan (his mother had died ten years previously). As they were returning to Chicago on the train, Jack suddenly blurted, "I think we ought to get married."
She said, "Why?"
"Well," he stammered, "Dad likes you."
"That's a silly reason."
"Well," he said, "you might go well in the act. I could use a girl in the act."
"That's an even sillier reason."
Jack flushed all over. "Well-uh-I guess, I guess, I love you."
She kissed him.
They were married on January 14, 1927, at the Clayton Hotel in Waukegan. He used her in his vaudeville act before she became the Mary Livingston of his radio show. They have been one of those ideally married Hollywood couples. She is fifteen years younger than Jack and has all of the qualities of quickness, adroitness, sharpness that Jack does not have. The one tragedy of their life was that they have been unable to have a child. They adopted a daughter, Joan, in 1935.
In 1928 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed Benny to a long-term contract, but after he did three films, "Hollywood Revue of 1929," "Chasing Rainbows" and "The Medicine Man," and failed to distinguish himself, the movies lost interest in him. In 1931, when he was playing in an edition of Earl Carroll's "Vanities," he began to be worried about the future, because the combination of the talking pictures and the depression was slowly killing off vaudeville. The new medium of radio, which was hiring vaudeville actors, was becoming big business. Benny's friend, George Burns, and his wife, Gracie Allen, had already done a twenty-six-week stint on the air. They advised Jack that this was the coming thing.
When the "Vanities" went on the road, Jack asked Carroll to release him from the contract. He was determined to stay in New York and break into radio. One day in Lindy's columnist Ed Sullivan, who then conducted a Broadway atmosphere radio program, invited Jack to be his guest. Together with Al Boasberg, Jack wrote a five-minute spot for himself, which opened, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jack Benny talking. There will be a slight pause while you say 'Who cares?' I'm going back to pictures in about ten weeks. I'm going to be in a new film with Greta Garbo. They sent me the story last week. When the picture opens, I'm found dead in the bathroom. It's a sort of mystery picture. I'm found in the bathtub on a Wednesday night. You'd really like Garbo. She and I were great friends in Hollywood. She used to let me drive her car all around town. Of course, she paid me for it."
Nobody was impressed by Jack's debut.
He sounded vapid and colorless. By 1932, it was clear that vaudeville was shot. Benny, getting panicky, went to William Stein, the president of the Music Corporation of America, a large talent agency, and pleaded for a band which he could lead, in the style of Ben Bernie. MCA said it was not interested because Jack Benny had no "name" value. In desperation, Benny took a night-club date in Miami. His act never went well in night clubs. The noise of the drunks and the waiters bringing food and drinks tended to distract attention from Jack's quiet, subtle delivery. While he was in Florida, his agent, Sam Lyons, wired him that Canada Dry had decided to sponsor him on a new radio program. He would be the master of ceremonies on a twice-a-week half-hour program on Mondays and Fridays over the NBC-Blue Network. Also starring on the program would be George Olsen and his band, and a singer, Ethel Shutta. It was simply a variety show, in which Jack introduced the various musical numbers and told jokes and funny stories directly to the radio audience.
The show ran all summer, and by the end of the summer, Jack and Al Boasberg had exhausted all their vaudeville material and all their variations on the vaudeville material.
"Where," groaned Jack, first uttering a cry that he was to frequently repeat during the succeding years, "is all the fresh material coming from? Without good material, you're dead." He was terrified as he realized that radio was an insatiable monster that swallowed scripts and demanded new ones incessantly.
George Burns introduced him to Harry Conn, a young gag writer. It was Conn, working with Benny, who created a new formula, a brand new approach in radio. Instead of reciting lines to the listener at home as if he were speaking from a stage, Benny developed a narrative show with a framework of situations, and a set of characters, on which amusing complications and funny pay-off lines could he hung. It was the great revolution in radio comedy.
"Practically all comedy shows on the radio today," says Fred Allen, "owe their structure to Benny's conceptions. He was the first to realize that the listener is in a living room at home not in a theater with one thousand other people. When he tunes into the Benny show, it's like tuning into somebody else's home. Benny also was the first comedian in radio to realize that you could get big laughs by ridiculing yourself, instead of your stooges."
Until about 1934, radio comedy was still a reflection of vaudeville material. The laugh shows-of which Jack Pearl's and Ed Wynn's were typical—depended on bizarre situations, unreal and exaggerated characters, a crackling succession of gags, with a "straight" line following hard upon a gag and a gag following hard upon the "straight" line. The comedian always reserved the meaty punch lines for himself. The comedian constantly played with puns and double-meaning lines.
Conn developed for Benny fairly real and human characters and situations and had the humor arising out of the characters and the situation. His dialogue sounded conversational instead of artificial. He eschewed puns and other forms of low comedy. Many of the situations were written around Benny's home life. The show usually began with an opening spot, hung around a topic like spring and there would be a series of interchanges between Benny, his girl friend Mary Livingston, who in those days played a dumb role, tenor Frank Parker who played an insulting employee, band-leader Don Bestor, and an announcer, Don Wilson, a two-hundred-and-thirty-pound gentleman of great bonhomie. The second spot on the program usually revolved around the problem of casting for the sketch. After the casting was settled, Parker sang an aria, and the program concluded with the sketch-often a satire of a popular book, play or movie.
Working with Conn during script and reading rehearsals, Benny began to develop a latent talent that he had never suspected was in him. He was a good judge of material, of the good and the bad, and he had an instinctive sense for what would "play" right on the air. As George Burns remarks, "He's the greatest editor of material in the business. He's got the knack for cutting out all the weak slush and keeping in only the strong punchy lines." And, because Benny has an apoplectic appreciation of other peoples' humor, he stimulates his writers.
Nevertheless, Benny's unconventional approach to radio staggered his sponsors, and he won public popularity slowly.
Although the New York World-Telegram poll of radio editors all over the country picked Benny, in 1934,as the best comedian on the air, Canada Dry refused to renew his option, and his next sponsor, Chevrolet, let him go after two seasons because William Knudsen of General Motors said he wasn't funny.
By 1935, he had slowly begun his climb up the ladder of Crossley ratings (the Hooper rating did not become available in radio until later), and he was standing in about ninth place. In 1936 he climbed higher, and, finally, in 1937 he passed Eddie Cantor and was firmly established in first place. Except for an occasional, brief dip, he has remained in the first five of radio ever since, despite all the vicissitudes of time and the coming new stars like Edgar Bergen and Fibber McGee and Bob Hope. As Benny says, "I can't make every program terrifically good but really to hold your nose at it—that I can keep it from. If my first three or four shows in a new season are good, I know I'm safe, because once I hit a good stride my writers and myself will keep on coasting from there, and all my other shows will be good. In radio, the pressure never lets up. In vaudeville, I never played to more than twelve hundred people at any one time, but with radio, in less than one half hour thirty million people can decide that you stink."
In 1941 Niles Trammell, president of NBC, was so awed by Jack's ability to sell Jello that he gave Benny a lifetime option on the network's Sunday night seven P.M. time segment, no matter who sponsored him in the future. Benny is still the only radio artist who has such an arrangement.
Toward the early part of 1936, relations between Benny and his writer, Harry Conn, became strained. Conn, who had started writing for Jack at sixty-five dollars a week, was now receiving thirteen hundred and fifty, the highest salary ever paid to a radio writer up till then. (Benny was the first actor in radio to pay writers good money). Conn believed that it was his imagination and wit that made Benny's success possible, and he believed that he was receiving only a small pittance of what he was really worth. He also wanted credit on the air. Benny refused to mention Conn’s name as writer on every program because, he said some listeners were under the impression that the events I narrated on the program were really happening. Finally, Conn said he was going out of town and if Benny wanted any more scripts he could come to the hotel and get them, providing he met the right conditions.
Benny was sitting around the Friar's Club when he received word that Conn I was in Atlantic City. It was only four days before the broadcast, and he had no script. He wired Conn: “It's a tossup who'll have a nervous breakdown, you or me, and I’m giving it to you."
With the aid of Goodman Ace, Benny hurriedly put together a script. Benny hired Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow, two writers who remained with him until 1943, when the present team of Sam Perrin, Milt Josefsberg, George Balzer and John Tackaberry took over the creative reins of the program.
Conn sued Benny for sixty thousand dollars, alleging that Benny was still using ideas and characters which he (Conn) had invented. Benny settled the case for ten thousand, and they have been enemies ever since.
It was shortly after this that Benny moved his program to California, and the present shape of it gradually began to form. Rochester emerged on the show in 1936, and Phil Harris came a year later. Mary found Dennis Day while listening to some audition records. Most of the running gags used today date from that period. A running gag usually starts in an accidental fashion. Once, during National Automobile Week, Mary asked Jack if he was going to buy a new car, and he said that he was trading his Stanley Steamer in for a Maxwell, which started the Maxwell theme. Rochester developed when Benny needed a Pullman-porter character for a situation that showed him, traveling cross-country in a train. Rochester's gravel-voiced impudence was so perfect a foil for Benny's gentle swagger that he became a permanent part of the show.
In recent years, Rochester's character has been toned down. He no longer shoots dice (over the air, at any rate), he has stopped drinking and he leads a less adventurous life with women. The Sportsmen Quartet-considered the funniest single fresh idea in radio comedy during the 1946-47 season-was intended to be merely a one-shot lampooning the Lucky Strike middle commercial. Public reaction was so favorable that the quartet was continued, and every week they sang a different lyric about LS/MFT to some well-known song.
During rehearsals, Benny is a fanatical perfectionist. He oversees every detail of the program—from the way Dennis Day is reading a line to the smallest sound effect.
Once, dissatisfied with the way his sound-effects engineer was producing the rustle of a piece of paper, he had the engineer try it forty times until he was satisfied with the result.
Benny treats his four writers with politeness, deference and even a little humility. During a script conference, Benny is treated as a writer, and his opinions are frequently overruled and he is even criticized severely. When Benny wants to contradict one of his writers, he'll say, very gently, "If you fellers don't mind, I think in here we should have a different twist."
The conferences begin immediately after a broadcast when the four writers go to Benny's dressing room and discuss the next week's program. Then—since each program falls into two broad classifications—the opening or "cast" spot, in which the various members of the cast are introduced; and the closing spot which consists of a dramatization, a guest spot, or some "real" situation such as Benny going to the station to catch a train—the two writing assignments are split. Perrin and Balzer will take one spot and Josefsberg and Tackaberry will take the other one."
On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, each team works separately and is in constant telephone communication with Benny. On Thursday, there is a meeting at Benny's house, and the first draft of the script is pounded out. On Friday, there is a second meeting at Benny's house, and the first draft is polished. On Saturday, in Studio L of the NBC building at Vine Street and Sunset Boulevard, there is a reading of the entire script, with the cast and the guest stars.
Then, after lunch, on Saturday, Benny, his writers, his script secretary, Jeanette Eymann, and the producer, Hilliard Marks, who is Benny's brother-in-law, lock themselves in a room" and go over the script line by line, word by word. In case of a dispute, a majority vote always rules, and Jack's vote has no more power than any writer's.
Benny is never satisfied with the script. He and his writers continue to polish and rewrite and cut.
On Sunday afternoon there is another editorial session, and up to a few minutes before the broadcast his writers will be bringing him a new line or a better way of saying a line already in the script.
OF THE thirty minutes of broadcast time, about two minutes is taken up by the opening and closing commercials, over which Benny has no control. The rest of the program is entirely in his hands. Of the remaining twenty-eight minutes, about seven are allotted to "spread"—the time consumed by studio applause and laughter. This leaves about twenty to twenty-one minutes of entertainment.
This means, roughly, that Benny receives about one thousand dollars a minute for portraying himself as an egotistic, grasping, avaricious, foolish man with a toupee.
Nevertheless, he recently remarked to a friend, “You take a violinist like a Heifetz or a Szigeti. Headaches like I have, they never know, because in music all you play is the classics, pieces somebody wrote in the year eighteen fifty nineteen hundred. A guy like Heifetz, he doesn't have to hire four composers and then have to drive himself crazy to have them compose eight numbers for his next concert. He gives the audience the good old Beethoven and Paganini numbers. Also Heifetz doesn't have to worry about his Hooper rating and about vice-presidents of NBC or sponsor trouble or advertising agency executives. I should have I listened to my father and practiced more on the fiddle when I was a boy in Waukegan."

Finding a Columbia Favorite

How can I describe the Columbia cartoon studio?

Unique, maybe?

The studio’s output was odd. There were Krazy Kat shorts which bore the name of George Herriman’s character and nothing else. There were Scrappy cartoons, where kids drank, cross-dressed and got beaten unconscious. There were imitation Disneys with loads of colour and not much else. There were shorts full of Hollywood celebrities, taking advantage of the abilities of animator and caricaturist Ben Shenkman. There were several regimes, one which hired Disney picketers and told them to experiment. There was another that wanted carbon copies of Warners and Tex Avery cartoons, so we got a Daffy-like duck and a Sylvester-like cat. And there were all kinds of stories that didn’t make much sense.

Oh, and a fox and crow, neither of whom were sympathetic or likeable. But they made money for Columbia in comic book licensing.

When we talk about the “Columbia” studio, we actually mean the Charles Mintz/Winkler Productions operations. When sound films were becoming inevitable, Mintz signed a deal with Columbia to release his Krazy Kat shorts; they had been distributed by Paramount in the silent days. A deal with signed around July 1, 1929. The first, Ratskin, was released on August 15th. Some of the early sound Krazys by Manny Gould and Ben Harrison are quite fun. In The Apache Kid (1930), Krazy is an apache dancer who rolls his own cigarette—which turns into the shape of a camel!

Mintz got the idea of moving the Krazy Kat studio to the West Coast. That’s what he did in February 1930. His brother-in-law, George Winkler, already had a studio in Los Angeles. It had been making Oswald cartoons until Universal decided in 1929 to get Walter Lantz to do it. The first Scrappy short was released on July 16, 1930. (The studio also made Toby the Pup shorts for release through RKO starting late July 1930).The two studios merged as Screen Gems in December 1931. Scrappy helped launch the phoney-Disney “Color Rhapsodies” series with Holidayland on November 9, 1934.

That brings us to this article from 1939 where the head of production at the studio tells us of the vetting process to get characters on the screen. Despite that, they’re not all that funny. By now, Columbia had taken over the operation of the studio from Mintz and re-named it Screen Gems.

No Limit on Work Hours of Cartoon Stars
HOLLYWOOD, Oct. 8—(AP)— There are movie producers who can slave-drive their juvenile stars without fear of child welfare groups and who can work their four-legged employees to the bone without a whimper from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
James Bronis is one. He's the head of Screen Gems, a Columbia producing organization.
"Our 'stock company'," explains Bronis, "is composed of characters developed in our animated cartoons.
"Our lively juvenile star, Scrappy, often works in 10 or 11 pictures at once, yet the educational authorities never have to reprove us.
Krazy Kat Works Hard
"Krazy Kat may work in half a dozen of the 27 pictures we have in production now without suffering the slightest physical harm, or inciting the anger of any animated animals guild.
"There is no danger of one of our other stars being tied up in another picture or at another studio. But we still have casting problems."
The trouble is, says Bronis, you can never tell how appealing a cartoon character, however quaint or humorous on paper, will be when brought to life.
"We give each new character a 'physical' examination," says Bronis.
Made To Run Gamut
"We try him out in every imaginable acrobatic action, and we put him through dramatic tests— make him run the gamut of pen-and-ink emotions.
"If he passes all these satisfactorily he gets a special test for the part in mind. If he succeeds in the minor role—if he clicks with the public—then we make him the hero of his own cartoon."
The elf-like beings in "The Happy Tots" passed the tests and are in their second color rhapsody. The Blue Birds, a new "family" group, are in their third cartoon. But Bronis favors three newcomers in "The House That Jack Built"—an ostrich, a beaver and a bear. Especially the ostrich.
"There's one actor," he says, "that won't lay an egg."

Mintz died on December 30, 1939.

Columbia decided to make its move. Frank Tashlin was brought in to oversee production. In September 1941, Ben Schwalb was transferred from New York to replace George Winkler as general manager and proceeded to lay off 30 people. Dave Fleischer took charge in April 1942 but was gone by December the following year; musician Paul Worth was his general manager and carried on until January 1945 when he was arrested on a forgery charge. Hugh McCollum was brought in by Columbia in March 1945 and finally Ray Katz was hired in July to manage the studio. By November 1946, it was all over. Columbia closed the studio. The last Screen Gems cartoon was released on June 30, 1949.

The Cohn family wasn’t done with cartoons yet. Much like it had distributed Disney cartoons in the early ‘30s, Columbia did the same with UPA shorts starting in late 1948. Then it bought a percentage of the newly-formed H-B Enterprises in 1957 and began putting Hanna-Barbera cartoons on the big screen from 1959 to 1965. They starred Loopy De Loop and were in limited animation. They were inferior to Quick Draw McGraw and Huckleberry Hound cartoons that kids were watching on their TV.

“Inferior” may be a way of describing the Columbia studio, but it’s a trifle unfair, despite a lot of what strikes me as very tedious and explanation-defying cartoons. They had Art Davis on staff for ten years, Emery Hawkins was put to work on Oscar-nominee The Little Match Girl, Preston Blair animated there for a time, Mel Blanc, Sara Berner, Danny Webb and Frank Graham were among the actors on its shorts, and I can’t help liking the audacity of Cal Howard creating an armed Daffy Duck knock-off with Woody Woodpecker music playing in the background.

Dancing Drunk Dwarves

The Merry Dwarfs (1929) is an exercise in timing everything (namely dancing) to music. At the end two of the dwarves land in a barrel of beer and drunken move around. Since they’re drunk, the ground moves, too.



It’s fun to watch, but Disney soon had to move past this kind of short with the addition of a story or stronger gags. The Fleischer cartoons in New York, arguably, were funnier because of oddities and inanimate objects becoming animate for a brief time.