Haaallo

Tex Avery experimented with deadpan characters before he invented Droopy at MGM. One was the emotionless m.c. in the Warner Bros. cartoon Hamateur Night. He talks slowly and deliberately from the side of his mouth.



Avery pulls a switch on us at the very end. The m.c. gets the audience to judge the amateur they like best. Egghead, who was pulled off the stage every time he tried to perform, gets wild applause from the audience. Suddenly, the m.c. reacts with a couple of takes.



The reason? Avery cuts to the audience. They are all Eggheads.



The laconic-until-the-penultimate-scene m.c. is played by Phil Kramer, whose casting by Tex Avery had to be deliberate, as he rarely appears in Warner Bros. cartoons. In fact, I associate him with Famous Studio’s shorts of the mid-‘50s as you can hear the exact same voice there. In fact, Kramer only had one voice. His own. It was a low-key whine.

Keith Scott’s research has determined he voiced three cartoons at Warners. I’ve found a newspaper blurb from mid-1939 reporting he had been hired to narrate Slap Happy Valley and a trade paper mention of his work on The Painter and the Pointer, both for Walter Lantz.

Phil Kramer was one of those people who kicked around Los Angeles radio in the 1930s, before and after the big network programmes came from New York and took over the local airwaves. In 1934, he appeared on KHJ’s Friday Frolics with comic actress/singer Elvia Allman. The two were also on the syndicated 15-minuter Komedy Kingdom (You can hear Allman on a number of Warners cartoons, including Avery’s Little Red Walking Hood).

Kramer later got regular roles with Joe Penner, on KFWB’s The Grouch Club and with Al Pearce. Other Warner Bros. cartoon actors inhabited these shows as well, including Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan. A couple of other clippings note his supporting role in 1940 in a show called Ann of the Airlines, co-starring Robert C. Bruce, the main narrator of Warners cartoons for years. A column from 1944 mentions he was on a show with Johnny Morgan, sponsored by Ballantine’s. That’s a sampling.

The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle of April 8, 1938 profiled him.

The Story of "Butch Shmutch,” Radio's Newest Comic Star
Phil Kramer Wins Radio Fame With His "Hallo Joe" On Joe Penner Programs; Movie Career Next
By DICK CHASE
Hollywood Correspondent of Seven Arts Feature Syndicate
It's a long hop from the Borsht Circuit to a spot on a radio coast-to coaster, but it's not so hard if you have one of those hail-fellow-all-wet whines and an irrepressible bent for kidding, like Mr. Butch Smutch—in real life Mr. Phil Kramer. Known universally and respected deeply by every youngster who ever turned a dial to Joe Penner's radio show, Kramer is pretty much of a favorite with the college crowd too. Since coining that sarcastic "Hallo Joe" greeting—in a way one of the neatest bits of counterfeiting in radio—he has been stamped definitely as a Man With a Voice.
It's about ten years since Phil was playing vaudeville in the East, and it was then that he made that famed string of summer resorts in the Adirondacks patronized by the most kosher element of New York. Under his belt he had several years of experience as a private secretary in a Wall Street coffee importing firm. He also had a flair for shorthand acquired alongside Billy Rose, with whom he went to school during the Lower East Side-Bronx days, as well as an undefinable quirk that made him do screwy things in a crowd that caused people to laugh.
Man of Many Talents
Besides these, he had a distinctive style at the piano, which always helps. When his ability to entertain casually, without premeditation, got his name linked with compliments, his career in the Bourse was ended . . . Then we find him in such New England spots as Camp Wah-kee-nah, a resort for Jewish boys in Bristol, N. H. Here he was on the payroll to entertain kids, and grown-ups as well, and he devoted himself to finding out what it is that makes people laugh.
It was at Wah-kee-nah, by the way, that Moe Berg of the Chicago White Sox and Eddie Wineapple of the Yanks, were serving as counsellors in those days. And down the road a piece the Marx Brothers had their summer home. All in all, Phil was in pretty good company. In 1930, after a few years of this sort of trouping, the doctor prescribed a change of climate, which brought Kramer to Los Angeles.
Work in plays, a movie short with Norman Foster, and variety shows kept him busy intermittently, in the best tradition. Notable parts were in stage productions of "Talk of the Town" and "Once in a Lifetime." In the latter there was a new face—Miss Rosalind Russell's, who since has gone places too.
"Radio Needed Kramer"

Bits in radio were helpful, but not the real thing. One afternoon, to get a laugh at a party, he phoned the J. Walter Thompson agency and informed the switchboard operator delicately but forcefully that radio needed Phil Kramer. The young lady on the hardboiled end of the line was so impressed by the revolving whirr in Phil's tones that she passed the word along. A couple of hours later a voice with an executive sting to it called Phil back . . . From then it was easy. His first big spot was with Burns and Allen. After three months with that hare-brained family circle he was hired by Joe Penner [right]. The turning point in his career came one night when Penner was in a haunted house, quaking with fear but determined he would stay in the place to win a $50 bet. There was a noise. Penner, shaking, cried: '''Who's there?" . . . This was Mr. Butch Smutch's cue. "Hallo, Joe," he drawled. "I'm the skull over here in the corner." . . But the studio audience was convulsed with laughter before he had finished the sentence. After the show, Penner sought him out. He liked the way the "Hello, Joe" had gone over with the audience. It would be kept in the show.
Single, living unostentatiously, Mr. Butch Smutch may soon be seen in pictures. And after two years of life with the dizzy people that Mr. Penner is so intent on "smashing," it may a pleasant change.

Piecing together biographies takes a bit of work. The 1940 Census shows Kramer was living with other show folk in the St. Moritz Hotel; he made $2,400 in 1939. His age is given as 40. Considering he was once a typist and a pianist, only one person matches those occupations with the same parents in various government documents. We can safely say Philip Kramer was born to Solomon and Julia Kramer on October 12, 1899. He was a typist for the Adams Manufacturing Co. at the end of World War One. In 1942, he was employed by the Russell Seeds ad agency across from NBC at Sunset and Vine. Its big client was Brown and Williamson Tobacco and sponsored Flagg and Quirt, an NBC Red network show he appeared on. He enlisted in the Army on September 1, 1942 and was discharged the following February 6, 1943.Radio Daily reported he did five shows immediately on returning then went to work for Douglas Aircraft.

When he returned to the east isn’t clear, but at the end of 1945 he had recorded Happy the Humbug for radio syndication with New York actors Jackson Beck, Mae Questel and Frank Milano. In 1948, the Gagwriters Institute of Palisades Park, New Jersey gave an honorary degree to him and Arnold Stang as “Doctors of Stooge-ry”; he was on the Slapsie Maxie Show at the time. That year, he was hired by Famous Studios for a Popeye cartoon. He pops up in NBC-TV programme publicity releases until 1960. He was also the voice of CBS-TV's stop-motion promotional character, Mr. Lookit, in the mid-50s.

Kramer died in Weehawken, New Jersey on March 31, 1972.

Scaring a Woodpecker

A Fine Feathered Frenzy is, in a way, Don Patterson’s version of Tex Avery’s Northwest Hounded Police, made eight years earlier. In that cartoon, the bad guy can’t escape from Droopy, and Tex gives him outrageous takes every time the wolf runs into the dog.

In this cartoon, Woody Woodpecker can’t escape the obese “Gorgeous Gal,” who wants to snare him in her mansion as a husband. Woody reacts with takes that were as outlandish as anyone ever got in the ‘50s at the Walter Lantz studio.

At Hanna-Barbera, Carlo Vinci used to draw a fear take that consisted of two alternating drawings, one with the character in a jagged outline. The same thing happens throughout this short.



Woody looks in a hand mirror and sees Gorgeous Gal behind him.



Woody tries to get away again.



Happy Homer Brightman borrows a gag from Avery’s Red Hot Riding Hood (1943). Tex’s animators use more panache than Patterson’s.



Patterson handled some of the animation himself, with Ray Abrams and Herman Cohen also assigned to his unit. Soon, hed be replaced in the director’s chair by Tex Avery.

Cat Smears

A Sylvester-like cat zips behind a chair in Catch As Cats Can, a 1947 release from the Art Davis unit.

Check out the dry-brush work.



He pops his head up.



Off he goes again. How about the stretch in-between in the first frame?



Multiple eyes are left behind as the cat zooms behind the couch.



More multiples as the cat pops up in a flower vase and zips into a corner.



No doubt this is the work of Don Williams. Basil Davidovich, Bill Melendez and Herman Cohen are the other credited animators; Cohen left the studio again after this cartoon. Dave Monahan came up with the story, but Bill Scott remembers he and Lloyd Turner worked on it as well. Monahan ended up at Screen Gems and then went into live action directing.

Director Davis used the Sylvester design in two of his shorts. In this one, Mel Blanc supplies a dopey voice, pretty similar to the original Barney Rubble voice.

A Mother To Many

There are people who appeared on TV screens so often at one time, it was almost impossible to remember when you first saw them.

One is Rosemary DeCamp.

Since I grew up in the 1960s, I probably saw her first on That Girl. Or maybe it was on Petticoat Junction. By then, she had been around a long time. DeCamp grew up in Jerome, Arizona, and appeared on stage in Phoenix for the first time in October 1927. Next, she enrolled in Mills College in Oakland in the late ‘20s and continued to appear on stage.

In 1935, she was in New York and not only assisting the drama critic of the Journal-American, but was heard on the CBS network supporting singer Frank Parker in a show for Atlantic Refining. It wasn’t long before her biggest radio break—playing next to Jean Herscholt on Dr. Christian.

As time ticked on, she signed a motion picture contract during World War Two and was handed mother roles. She was still playing them 20 years later on TV.

This story appeared in papers starting around June 2, 1967

Rosemary Has Knack With Mother Roles
By DONALD FREEMAN
Copley News Service
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Rosemary DeCamp, a fine-looking figure of a lady, has that special isolated knack that seems to fit her for the role of playing someone’s mother or sister.
At the moment she is playing Mario Thomas’ mother in “That Girl” and before that she was Bob Cummings’ sister (and, at the same time, Dwayne Hickman’s mother) in the old series of fond memory when Cummings as a photographer, with all the models, seemed to be occupied so often in the darkroom.
“It’s been nine years now since the Bob Cummings Show was on TV,” Miss DeCamp said, “and still people see me in public and they recognize me and they wonder why is it that I’ve aged in those nine years when, of course they obviously haven’t. And people sidle up to me and ask me about Bob Cummings. ‘How old is he really?’ they want to know. And I say ‘Oh he’s a man of great talent. By the way have you seen me lately in ‘That Girl’?”
And long before the Bob Cummings show in the early 1940s, there was Rosemary DeCamp playing James Cagney’s mother in “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and Ronald Reagan’s mother in “This Is The Army” — using a very heavy makeup job since she is, it turns out, younger than the aforementioned men.
Still, as Rosemary notes, portraying someone’s mother is less a matter of makeup than of demeanor, of stance and attitude.
"I have this nonaggressive, motherly look,” Rosemary concedes with a mock frown. “In characterization, I go for the mother everybody would like to be — that I’d like to be, too, with my four daughters.
“We all fail, I suppose, but it’s good to try. Now, as Bob Cummings’ sister, I was Miss Practical, saying, ’Oh come on!’ to Bob, who was the perpetual dreamer. Ah, but every woman with a dreamer for a husband or brother or son could identify with me.”
ROSEMARY was taking her ease with a pre-luncheon vodka and tonic, just before accepting an award from the California Federation of Women’s Clubs. For the last 15 years, she has voiced the commercials on "Death Valley Days,” the most durable Western of them all — “They call me the 21st mule,” she says — along with playing an occasional role as some cowpoke’s mother.
She is a great booster for the series. “The Old West, you know, wasn’t really settled by men,” Rosemary said. “The women did the settling.

“The men were all too busy fighting one another, but before they knew it their women were planting gardens and having kids and organizing an early PTA and then when the men went back into the house to get some more ammunition — lo the West was settled.”
Rosemary DeCamp is herself a product of the West, born in Prescott, Ariz., the daughter of a mining engineer. “You know about Bodie, once a big mining center and now a ghost town off the highway as you get near Death Valley.
“My grandmother and grandfather were married there in Bodie. Very beautiful woman, my grandmother, but there was always some question in the family as to just what she was doing in a town like Bodie.
“Grandfather was a wetback from Canada — by that I don’t mean he swam across the Great Lakes but he did sneak across the border. His name was DeChamps but he figured, when he hit the West, that was too fancy a name for a miner. So he called himself DeCamp instead. Which led in time to Rosemary DeCamp. Sounds like a stripper doesn’t it?”
THE WIFE of Superior Court Judge John Shidler, Rosemary is a woman of many sides and undoubtedly the only actress equipped with a masters degree in psychology (from Mills College).
Several years ago, she spent four months in Pakistan in a State Department cultural exchange program, lecturing on drama and poetry while her husband spoke on law at Pakistani universities.
She’s a member of the fund-raising arm of the USO. She’s written newspaper columns and a successful children’s book entitled “Here Duke!” and she’s won awards for her enameling.
And long ago in the pleistocene age of TV, she played wife to Jackie Gleason in a series which later in form and concept would form the basis for “The Honeymooners.” The show won the very first Emmy in 1949.
“Jackie,” Miss DeCamp, recalled “stayed sober, he dieted, he was nice and he was awfully funny. He was always so shiny and immaculate and, the odd things that you remember, he always smelled so nice.
“We had a producer who shelled out to buy caps for Jackie's teeth. Well, he and Jackie got embroiled in a big feud and this producer would yell at Jackie, ’Remember, Gleason every time you smile — you’re smiling with my TEETH!”

About the original Riley TV show, DeCamp told Arizona Republic columnist Maggie Savoy in 1962: “Nobody had any sets; we shot our ‘Life of Riley’ series with two cameras and old radio scripts. It was rugged: We’d shoot 50 pages of dialogue every five days. But we invented many techniques that are in use today—and walked off with the first Emmy award.”

She had more to say about Riley and playing a mother in this syndicated column from April 8, 1967. Evidently the “teeth” story played well with the media.

Sabu To Marlo Thomas, She’s Forever A Mom
By RICHARD K. SHULL
She'd probably give you a belt in the chops if you said it to her face, but Rosemary DeCamp is the mother of television.
For more than a quarter-century, she's been the Hollywood image of the all-American mom. Way back in 1942, before the first of her own four daughters was born, she played Jimmy Cagney's mother in the movie "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Cagney was colder than Rosemary.
Her dozens of celluloid progeny range from Sabu to her current child, Marlo Thomas, in the "That Girl" TV series.
Of course, that's not to consider her radio mom roles in her earlier days during the 17 years she also played Jean Herscholt's nurse on the "Dr. Christian" series.
For the past 15 years, she's been the motherly pitchwoman from U.S. Borax Co.'s products on TV, even using her own children as props in the early days.
"I had the first TV commercial contract with the Screen Actors Guild," she said. "It's historical now, but at the time I was looked down upon for doing commercials because I was still doing feature films."
Now the members of the Screen Actors Guild draw more than one-third of their combined incomes from TV pitchwork, and the actors scramble for the privilege of commenting on "really good draft-brewed beer" or declaring "boss, you have bad breath."
The change in attitude on commercials is only one of many passing moods Miss DeCamp has witnessed in her long career.
Sitting at lunch, she recalled one of her earliest ventures into a TV series—"that was in 1949 when there were 47,000 sets in the country," she said.
"Jackie Gleason and I did 26 episodes of 'The Life of Riley.' That show won the first Emmy for filmed TV in 1950."
Gleason? "Life of Riley?"

"Yes, Jackie Gleason. I'd already done the movie version with Bill Bendix [in 1949], but Bill wouldn't stoop to nickelodeon TV in those days. So they brought in this unknown from New York," she recalled.
"Jackie was marvelous. He had no temperament. He was a quiet, hard-working guy. Of course, the show itself was a nightmare. In the 26 weeks we filmed, we ran through eight directors and five cameramen. One director committed suicide, but I don't know if it was because of the show," she said.
"Irving Brecher was the producer, and he paid to have Jackie's teeth capped. When he'd get mad at Jackie, he'd say, 'Remember, when you smile, that's my smile.’
Jackie told him, 'I'll never mention your name again.' If you've ever noticed, in any biographies of Jackie or in his interviews, he never mentioned 'Life of Riley' or Irving Brecher," Rosemary said, smiling with her own teeth.

Later on TV, DeCamp played Shirley Jones’ mother on The Partridge Family and Buck Rogers’ mother in an episode of the 1981 series. In the movies, she was George Gershwin’s in Rhapsody in Blue. There was one other mother DeCamp almost played. She was signed by Leonard Stern (who had his own Gleason connection as writer on his variety show) in 1975 to portray Patty Duke’s mother and “no-nonsense” landlord in a sitcom co-starring Duke’s husband, John Astin. It evidently went nowhere.

When Bea Benaderet was ill, she filled the “mom” breach on Petticoat Junction as Aunt Helen. Perhaps she was simply too busy to be a permanent addition to the cast when Benadaret died; June Lockhart was hired instead. She was exhibiting her copper enamelling work, raising money for the USO and active in the Democrat Party. On top of that, her memoirs, Tales From Hollywood was turned into an audio book.

Despite all that, the Institute of Family Relations once granted her its Mother of Distinction award for doing “more to glorify American motherhood through her film portrayals than any other woman.”

She died of pneumonia at age 90 in early 2001.