Draft Board!?!?!!

Draftee Daffy wasn’t high on my list of liked cartoons when I was a kid. Not being an American, the flag-waving didn’t resonate with me and the cartoon seemed to be little more than seven minutes of Daffy running.

Well, it’s actually more than that. It was rather audacious of Bob Clampett to make this one, considering the hyper-patriotic films and songs swirling around during the war. Here’s a character who doesn’t want to serve in the military, something I imagine reflected the feelings of some Americans at the time.

As for the running, we’re fortunate today that DVDs were invented so we can watch this cartoon frame by frame and enjoy Daffy’s emoting.

There are plenty of scenes to pick from but here’s one (Manny Gould’s animation?) where our favourite duck joyously sings about the man from the Draft Board coming to see him. Then he realises what that means.



Below, some anticipation drawings following by curly-tongued extremes.



Daffy goes up. And down.



Clampett and writer Lou Lilly toss in a send-up of the Sinatra-associated song “It Had To Be You” (written in 1924, long before Frankie began his singing career). “It couldn’t be him,” Daffy cries, pointing to a goldfish that shows up in the cartoon solely for the gag. I like the expression on the fish.



“It couldn’t be you,” he wails as he points to a mirror. Since he’s in the mirror, it could be him!



Daffy trembles. “Get ahold of yourself,” he says. So he does. Literally.



Clampett seems to have loved including radio show references in his cartoons. The man from the Draft Board sounds like Mr. Peavey (played by Richard LeGrand) on The Great Gildersleeve, who remarked “Well, now, I wouldn’t say that” on the show. Clampett treats the line as a running gag.

The cartoon ends with Daffy being chased through the underworld by the Draft Board guy dressed as Satan. The message: draft dodgers can go to Hell. It seems Clampett made a patriotic cartoon after all.

Walking Running Gag

A running gag ends with a topper in the fine Tex Avery cartoon Little Red Walking Hood (1937).



A wolf goes after Red Riding Hood (first, romantically, then gastronomically) but stops every time Egghead strolls through a scene, whistling “The Organ Grinder’s Swing.”



In a clever scene, Egghead helps move the plot along.



The speeding wolf ignores the hitchhiking Egghead, who manages to get a ride anyways. How did he get on a car that went past him? Anything can happen in a cartoon!



The wolf can’t open the front door or a closet door, but Egghead can.



In the climax, Red struggles to get away from the-better-to-eat-you-with wolf. Egghead incongruously saunters through yet again.



Finally, the curious wolf stops him. “Now, who the heck are you, anyways?” he asks.



Look how casual Egghead is as he opens his violin case.



Egghead now becomes a little dopey as we discover he’s not carrying a violin.



“I’m the hero in this picture,” he chortles. Iris out. Music ends.

Wait! Tex has fooled us. The cartoon is not over. Iris in for a quick kissing finale as the Carl Stalling-led orchestra blasts out a final note. Iris out again.



There are so many great things in this short. Characters comment to you on the plot as you watch the cartoon. There’s a theatre patron-silhouette gag. There’s a radio reference (the wolf becomes Al Pearce as Elmer Blurt at the front door). Elvia Allman provides a fine satire on Katherine Hepburn’s voice. Tedd Pierce is excellent as the wolf, especially when he does a Ted Lewis-like sing/speak of the tune “Gee, But You’re Swell.” The license plate gag is fun. I love Johnny Johnsen’s coloured-pencil backgrounds; they suit a fairy tale send-up. And there’s fine animation from the creditted Irv Spence, including the final scene (mostly animated on ones).

Mel Blanc is Egghead. Cal Howard gets the rotating writing credit. The cartoon was Blue Ribboned on August 17, 1946 but the version on DVD, fortunately, has the original titles. The cartoon was first released on November 6, 1937.

Spot the Stars With Scrappy

How many cartoons with celebrity caricatures did the Columbia/Charles Mintz studio make anyway?

One of them is Scrappy’s News Flashes (1937), a not-all-that-strong send-up of movie news reels. Writer Al Rose saves the celebrities for the second half of the cartoon. To make them different than other Columbia shorts, he has turned them into babies.



Here we see Kate Hepburn. Rally we do. The Hepburn-like patter is handled nicely by Elvia Allman; you can hear her do the same impression in the Warners cartoos I Only Have Eyes For You and Little Red Walking Hood.



This is German-born character actor Herman Bing. The voice here is a Danny Webb impersonation but Bing himself worked on one cartoon, playing the ringmaster in Dumbo.



Need I say who these are? The gag is Groucho’s moustache is made from smeared-on jam. Chico plays the piano (I thought the song was Ida but it’s not) and Harpo plays the harp. Columbia sprung for an actual harpist instead of using a piano for a harp like some other studios.



Clark Gable wiggles his big ears.



Martha Raye has a large mouth. That’s the gag. It’s a pretty obvious one and that’s how Rose and the uncredited director decide to end the cartoon.

Musical director Joe De Nat uses what sure sounds like the Fox Movietone News theme at the start and finish. Warners cartoons fans should recognise the music under the Sports portion of the phoney news reel as Carl Stalling put it in a number of cartoons. It’s J.S. Zamecnik’s “In the Stirrups” (heard in Porky and Teabiscuit and Draftee Daffy, among other cartoons).

There’s an obscure radio reference in this sequence. Narrator Scrappy ends the ski portion with “What’s the difference, so long as you’re healthy?” Mary Livingstone used to say that on the early Jack Benny radio shows. She had stopped doing that a few years before this cartoon was made.

Harry Love is the credited animator.

My thanks to Milton Knight for pointing out this cartoon.

The Sazzling Sounds of Radio

There was one person essential to every comedy/variety show on network radio. It wasn’t the star; both Jack Benny and Jimmy Durante were forced to take time off during the season because of illness.

It would have been unfathomable for Benny’s show, or Durante’s, or anyone else’s, to go on the air without a sound effects man.

One of the most famous of radio’s sounds—Fibber McGee’s closet emptying with a huge crash to the floor—was honoured in a song written by the show’s musical director, Billy Mills, called “(I’m in Love) With the Sound Effects Man,” later recorded by Spike Jones.

Rarely did sound men get credit on the air. The radio column in the Pittsburgh Press of Nov. 11, 1942 claimed the first time had been the previous Sunday when Arch Oboler’s announcer, Frank Martin, said “Sound, Harry Saz.”

Harry himself appeared on the air at least twice. Once was on December 8, 1937 on the “People You Didn’t Expect To Meet” segment of Fred Allen’s show. An unbylined story in the Greenville News, Mar. 1, 1936:

Fred Allen has a great respect for Harry Saz, his NBC sound effect man.
Sound effects often make a sketch, says Fred. He has turned out many Town Hall Tonight scripts that look quite lifeless on paper, yet the instant they go into rehearsal with gun shots, broken windows, sow mooings and train whistles, they pick up pace and become entertaining.
The most difficult effect Harry has recently achieved for Fred was the sound of a horse being thrown through a window.
Harry had to smash a chair through plate lass, whinny, and scream at the same time.

From the Pittsburgh Press, March 7, 1937.

NEW YORK, March 6.—One of Fred Allen’s most enthusiastic fans is the big noise on the “Town Hall Tonight” broadcast over the NBC-Red Network at 9 p. m., EST. He is Harry Saz, veteran NBC sound effects expert who has served with the lanky comedian for four years.
Although Harry works through two rehearsals and practically has the script memorized, he gets so interested in Allen’s antics that he has difficulty attending to the serious business of producing the many and varied noises required for the show.
Fred has become so accustomed to Harry and has such confidence in his ingenuity, he insists that he be assigned to all his shows.

Where did radio sound effects people come from? It wasn’t like the profession existed before broadcasting. The Press story of Nov. 11, 1942 gave a bit of Saz’s background, and columnist Si Steinhauser repeated a story he related several times over the years.

When Harry was a page boy at NBC he was an eager kid who went around with his eyes wide open, but he never spoke unless asked a question. He had a quick smile. Came an opportunity to study sound engineering and Harry got the call. He moved up to top broadcasts and when the old Showboat of Thursday nights was at its peak Harry was the sound engineer.
One anniversary night Molasses and January repeated the first story they ever told on the air as was their annual custom involving a "holdup" to convince their landlady that they had been robbed and couldn't pay their rent.
Molasses tossed his hat on the floor and January was to put a bullet through it. Harry Saz pulled a prop gun at the right moment but it jammed. In a split second he yanked the trigger of a second gun and nothing happened. That didn't stop this alert graduated page boy for he swung around and sent his fist crashing through a sound effects door. Molasses was quick to help as he jibbed "Man that was no resolver, that was a cannon."
When radio "went Hollywood" and the call went out for the best sound engineers the industry had. Harry Saz headed the parade to movieland.

Steinhauser added this story in his column of Oct. 14, 1934:

Studio attaches were not surprised that Harry Saz had been so alert. They recalled that shortly before he was supposed to cause a telephone to ring and the gadget failed him. A battery had gone dead, a wire came lo[o]se—something had happened so the "phone" wouldn't work. Millions of persons from coast to coast were listening. Harry stepped quickly to the mike and remarked to the astounded radio star on the program, "Your phone in ringing in the other room." Then followed the simulated phone conversation. And that's why giant corporations, owned by the biggest bankers in America, say "We want Harry Saz to handle the sound effects on our programs."

Sound effects always made interesting copy for radio columns in newspapers, whether it was how they were made or screw-ups. This is a piece of flackery written by General Foods’ P.R. department and appeared in newspapers starting in April 1934:

When you hear the swish of the paddle wheels on Captain Henry's Show Boat, the sharp, quick ring which warns of the rising curtain, and other such familiar Thursday night radio sounds, you are listening to the handiwork of Harry Saz. He is one of a staff of eight sound effects men without whom a great many programs could not go on. Harry works on fourteen major programs a week and that means he must attend all rehearsals as well as all performances.
So many stars have come to depend upon him that, not infrequently, they hold up their own rehearsals while waiting for Harry to get through on another program. The clatter of horses' hoofs, the slamming of doors, the firing of pistol shots, the thump of marching feet—all of these effects are the work of Harry's nimble hands and expert sense of timing. He works with a script, just as actors and singers do, waits for his cues, and produces the proper sound at the exact moment in order to get the right effect.
Once it happened that Harry turned two pages, missed a cue and heard an actor saying, "Listen to the ringing bells," although no bells were ringing. Her rushed over to bell contraption and worked the works, "better late than never," he says. On another occasion, Harry missed ringing a telephone which was the que for an actor to say, "Here's a telegram, sir." Whereupon, Harry stepped up to the microphone and saved the day by saying the telegram line himself.
When Harry has a spare moment, he experiments with new effects. He invented the show boat curtain.

Saz even made Ed Sullivan’s show biz column (Sullivan was a newspaperman before he was a wooden TV host). This is from December 1, 1938.

Harry Saz has a job in Hollywood which few envy. . . . He is head of the sound effects department of N. B. C. out here. . . . He gets all sorts of curious requests for sound effects and must produce them for broadcasts. . . . Most unusual, he says, was Boris Karloff’s request for the sound of a human heartbeat on the Bergen-McCarthy program.
Saz finally solved it by baring his chest and putting a very sensitive microphone next to it. . . . The heartbeat then was relayed to an echo chamber and the volume amplified. . . . On a recent Bob Hope program Saz had to supply the sound effects of a bowling alley.
On a Walter O’Keefe program sound effects had to supply the sounds of a man milking a cow to the rhythm of “Blue Danube.” Saz is a product of New York’s Stuyvesant High school.

On the Allen broadcast, which came from NBC Hollywood (still on Melrose Avenue), he joked that when he worked on Jack Benny’s show, Benny got caught in his prop door so he couldn’t close it. When he moved to California, he worked with Benny again. James Harper’s column in the Los Angeles Daily News story of Jan. 31, 1938, said he was one of five soundmen needed to put together the noises for Benny’s spoof of the movie The Hurricane. The San Fernando Valley Times of Sept. 19, 1941 reported Saz “spent so many hours in a soundproof studio putting together” Benny’s Maxwell. Mel Blanc didn’t supply vocal efforts for the car until after World War Two.

A familiar sound on radio in the late ‘30s was a knock on a door, accompanied by Al Pearce as Elmer Blurt saying “I hope nobody’s home, I hope, I hope, I hope.” Pearce did the knocking, but Saz and assistant Ed Ludes built a special door that looked like a pulpit, with a four-inch circle indicating where the star should put his fist for the best sound (Dayton Herald, Nov. 30, 1938).

Back to Benny for a second. Saz likely was not responsible for this as he was still in New York, but a syndicated story in the Lincoln Journal and Star of April 4, 1937 related:

On the Jack Benny program some time ago, there was a short episode in the script that involved the mixing of an ice-cream soda. The sound effects man, on short notice, rigged up a regular syphon bottle. This sounds like a gag, but at the actual broadcast the technician continued to read his cues as he reached for the syphon—and poured the seltzer water all over Jack and Mary. The studio audience, you may remember, roared, but the air audience couldn’t understand.

And a network/agency blurb reported in the Washington Evening Star of May 11, 1935 could have been Saz at work, though Jack was on the West Coast in April.

The sound effect of hitting a golf ball, which radio listeners heard on a recent Jack Benny program, during the imaginary match between Frank Parker and Benny, was accomplished by three of the N. B. C. sound-effects staff.
One man swept a willow switch through the air; one hit a block with a hammer and another blew a thin [tin] whistle.
The sound effect where Jack lost his ball in the bushes was made by actually bringing real bushes into the studio and breaking them by hand in front of the microphone.

There was not much for sound effects men to do when network radio died in the 1950s. Saz got out before then. Not long after Pearl Harbor, he trained women to take over from men. In 1943, he moved into the production department at NBC, with Ludes promoted to his job. A year later, Saz was the assistant producer on RKO’s Hollywood Star Time on the Blue Network, employed by the show’s agency, Foote, Cone & Belding. By 1947 he was a producer in the Hollywood office of Ted Bates & Co., and on the executive of the Hollywood Ad Club. The agency transferred him to New York City in February 1954, and he remained until April 1973 when he became director of station relations for a programme producing company called Quadrant. Saz was president of the Kiwanis Club and the P.T.A. in Ardsley, N.Y., and the Democratic Party Club in East Hampton before deciding life was easier in California and moved to Spring Valley in May 1979.

Saz was born in New York on December 27, 1910 and died in San Diego on June 7, 1994.

Here is the Allen broadcast on which Saz appeared.

Bob Newhart, Ladies Man

Bob Newhart had one of the most successful comedy LPs of all time. So what did NBC do? Turn him into a variety show host.

This was in 1961, long before the CBS series produced by Mary Tyler Moore that became a monster hit. Or the one where he ran an inn in New England that turned out to be a dream of the Newhart character in the first show.

There were sketches, monologues, an announcer, a band, guest singers and a revolving supporting cast that included Joe Flynn, Ken Berry, Jackie Joseph, and comedian Mickey Manners, all in colour. Fans of cartoon voice people will be pleased to see that making on camera appearances were Mae Questel (Olive Oyl), Henry Corden (the second Fred Flintstone), Jim Backus (Mr. Magoo), Jerry Hausner (Mr. Magoo’s nephew) and Cal Howard (yes, that Cal Howard).

Newhart and his show were profiled by the Boston Traveler of November 20, 1961. It won an Emmy for best humour show, but lasted one turbulent season, not coping well in the ratings opposite The Naked City.

By ELEANOR ROBERTS
Know what happens to a comedian when he’s 32, charming, rich and has a weekly Wednesday night show on TV?
He gets proposals—hundreds of them—in the mail.
NICE SENSE OF HUMOR
And since the comedian is Bob Newhart, all these dear ladies in search of the right husband want to marry him because he has such a nice sense of humor. “We’re on the same wave length,” they write. “That’s why I know we’d get along so well.”
Bachelor Bob is getting along beautifully in his single state, than you, and between scraping up enough material for a show a week and playing golf at Bel Air, he’s busy, but busy.
He dates, of course.
“But no starlets,” he told us in an interview from Hollywood.
WRITING AT NIGHT
“When you talk to them, it’s like putting your ear up to a sea shell and listening to the ocean rush in.”
Trying to be consistently funny before a TV audience of 35 million people is quite a grind, but Bob prefers it to a life of night club acts and one-night concert stands.
“I do most of my writing at night,” he explained, “which leaves the days free for golf.
“It’s a great game for relaxation. I suppose it’s a little like drinking—you forget all your problems while you’re doing it, but find out they’re still around afterwards.”
CONSTANT HEADACHE
Newhart’s chief worries are whether or not his sketches go over.
“It’s a constant headache,” he admitted. “You never know. Sometimes you think you have a great show, and it turns out to be a bomb. You can’t second-guess an audience.
“We’ve made some mistakes this year. The greeting-card sketch on our opening show sure laid an egg. But then we discovered, from this, that I couldn’t play the meek little man. And we learned to stay away from it.
“You have to open a new can of peas in this business occasionally,” he pointed out. “But it’s one thing trying out a sketch in front of a night club audience, and quite another making your mistakes in front of a big TV audience.”
HAS STAFF OF WRITERS
Like most comedians of the “new school,” Bob has always written his own material.
But now, with 39 shows to do, he has a staff of writers, and it’s a little like trying to feel comfortable when you’re wearing someone else’s clothes.
“We have our arguments,” Bob said cheerfully. “But then, most writers are creative, opinionated people. The man who has the final say is our producer, Roland Kibbee.
“If I really feel uncomfortable saying certain lines, Roland agrees it’s better not to try them. But he’s had more experience in this business than I have, so I usually listen to him.”
SATURDAY SHOW TAPED
Saturday nights the Newhart show (Ch. 4, Wednesdays 10-10:30 p.m.) is taped. When it’s over Bob, Roland Kibbee and some of the other boys walk across the street to Sailee’s to eat.
“We sit around over a couple of scotches and water, eat hamburgers and whine,” he laughed. “But it gives us a chance to let our hair down. If I went straight home I’d like awake until 4 a.m. I’m so tense.”
We asked Bob what happened to the Fred Allen library he had spoken about using at the start of the season.
“Portland was wonderful to offer it to us,” he said. “But actually I felt Fred’s dry, salty humor was different from mine, and that it wouldn’t be wise to attempt it.”
LISTENERS LOVED IT
One of the first things Bob did when he went “network” was to hire Dan Sorkin as the announcer of the show.
“Dan gave me my first break,” Bob said. “But I gave him the job not only out of gratitude, but because we needed a strong, forceful personality and a new face.”
Sorkin, a disk jockey on Chicago’s WCSL [sic], heard Newhart’s monologue on the airlines, and played the tape on his show two years ago. The listeners loved it.
The station manager thought it was for the birds.
But Sorkin took the tapes to Warner Brothers’ Records Inc., where James B. Conkling, the president, listened to them. After that, Bob was made.
Dan still plays up-tempoed, mass-appeal jazz for his morning listeners at WCSL, commuting to Hollywood each week to appear on the Newhart show.
There’s another bright, bouncy fan of Bob’s who wouldn’t miss his show.
She’s Sister Mary Joan of the Immaculate High School in Chicago, who is Bob’s sister.
And every Wednesday night at the convent all the nuns, with special permission, tune in the Newhart show, and have a ball.

Newhart wasn’t popular with everyone when his first show didn’t take off, and we don’t just mean what NBC-TV sources described in Variety as the “extreme right wing” writing preposterous letters claiming Newhart’s satire was “un-American,” and “must be Communist-tinged.” He fired some writers and his director, and that prompted his producer to quit in protest. Still, the producer rather awkwardly tried to walk the line between praise and criticism. Here’s a syndicated column from Feb. 17, 1962.

Tells Why Newhart Unique
Department Producer Comments
By HAROLD STERN
The Bob Newhart Show of Feb. 28th (already taped) marks the termination of producer-writer Roland Kibbee's affiliation with the comedian. Various reports have indicated that Kibbee's departure is due to illness, to a conflict with Newhart or to almost any other reason you might think of.
Kibbee himself isn't too much help.
"Why am I leaving the show," he answered. "Let’s just say that I'm tired. If you want to know the circumstances that wore me out, that's a long and complicated story I'd rather not go into. Our director Coby Ruskin gave an interview to a Hollywood trade paper in which he blasted Newhart. He was fired and I asked for my release because firing Ruskin over the producer's head constituted a breach of contract. I had asked for my release before, but this time I was justified and I got it.
“Yes,” he continued, "Bob and I have had disagreements, but there is no ill feeling between us. You might say we're both very disappointed at how our affiliation turned out.
“I took the Newhart Show to begin with because it was the sort of challenge I couldn't resist. Ever since Nat Hiken and I were writers for Fred Allen, I wanted to prove this sort of material could exist on TV. I think we have proved it. If another comedian like Newhart were to come along next year and I had a chance to work with him, I would. But I don't expect another Newhart.
"I think Bob Newhart is unique in today's world of comedy," Kibbee said emphatically. "He's able to hide his own personality behind characterizations. He has an ingratiating public image, yet he invariably plays the villains in his sketches. Only in rare instances like the Lincoln sketch or the one about the driving instructor does Bob play the victim.”
All things being equal, Roland Kibbee believes that Bob Newhart should have a 25-year life expectancy in television. However, he feels that Newhart's number 1 problem will always be writing. He believes a permanent three or four man writing-staff (rather than a transient one) would help maintain his level of comedy.

We don’t have Ruskin’s comments (Variety reported Ruskin was irked that Newhart wanted to use cue cards), but we do from one of the show’s writers. This is from Les Wedman’s column in the Vancouver Sun of May 26, 1962. Just before being nominated for a couple of Emmys, the show received a Peabody Award.

There were laughs the other night when Lucille Ball almost ran out of breath reading the 11 of the Bob Newhart Show writers nominated for an Emmy. They were Roland Kibbee, Dean Hargrove, Phil Sharpe, Norman Leibman, Howard Snyder, Bob Kaufman, Charles Sherman, Don Hinkley, Milt Rosen, Bernie Chambers—and Bob Newhart.
Fortunately for the dignity of the show, they didn't win. If they had, the Emmy ceremony could have turned Into Fight of the Week.
The nominations were entered by Newhart, himself included. But Bob Kaufman—also on the list but off the payroll about a month ago—says he told Newhart he'd beat him up in front of 30 million viewers if he dared accept best writing Emmy.
Roland Kibbee, producer and head writer until he left the show months ago, agreed with Kaufman that Bob Newhart hasn't written one line of his own show this season.
"He can't write. He can't even spell," claims Kaufman in a report in Variety, the show biz bible. He says be told Newhart that if he went on stage to accept an Emmy for writing “I’ll take it away from you."
He said "for 19 shows we didn't even let Newhart in the story room. We told him to play golf. He wanted to take out all the jokes."
Contrary to public opinion, Kaufman went on, Newhart didn't want satire on the show. "Now he wants to be a martyr and say he tried but America wasn't ready.” Ralph Levy, who replaced Kibbee as producer of the show, allied himself with the star and his uneasiness at satire.
"Newhart," says Kaufman, "can ad lib, and did. He's the best monologist I've ever seen, but he's no writer. He's a credit-grabber.

Sour grapes? As far as I know, Newhart wrote the routines on his early comedy albums. I have trouble believing he was spelling-challenged.

Kaufman went on to write Divorce American Style and Freebie and the Bean as well as The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington. Newhart went on to be beloved by the entertainment world, thanks partly to two successful television sitcoms, and is mourned after his death at age 94.

Benny and Benny

Jack Benny and Benny Rubin were both big vaudeville stars. They each headlined at the Palace in New York. Both appeared in short films when the talkies became popular. They co-emceed a bill at the Mayan Theatre in Los Angeles in 1930. Benny has even been given credit for giving Jack his stage name when it had to be changed from “Ben K. Benny.”

The two also starred in their own radio shows. But while Jack appeared regularly in living rooms from 1932 to 1965 (1950-onward on television), Rubin’s variety show lasted one season (1936-37) and then he had to be content with supporting roles, with the exception of a Los Angeles TV show that appeared for less than a month in 1949 (he quit after the producing William Morris agency told him what to do on camera). At one point, he opened a dress shop to make ends meet.

One person who put Benny to work was Jack Benny. In the mid-‘40s, Rubin was hired to play the Tout, but when a stage show cut into his time he was quickly replaced with Sheldon Leonard. Rubin had other periodic roles with Benny on radio into the 1950s; the only recurring character was the “I dunno” guy. He also appeared on the Benny TV show; in the final two seasons he was in about a third of the episodes.

Here’s Rubin talking about Jack Benny in a United Press International column that began appearing in papers on July 30, 1964, shortly before the start of Jack’s final season on television.

Benny uses Rubin often
By JOSEPH FINNIGAN
UPI Writer
HOLLYWOOD—Benny Rubin, a character actor for ciowns, has appeared on more than 500 Jack Benny shows, building a reputation as laugh insurance for comedians.
Besides Jack Benny, the veteran Rubin has worked with other top comics, including Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Red Skelton, Gracie Allen and Danny Thomas.
When a comedian needs a performer for a scene, they know they can depend on Rubin not to foul up the act. That's one reason he has been with Benny more than 500 times.
“I've lost count," said Rubin who is going to work this week at Revue Studio in another of Jack's programs. "There's a good reason for it all," explained Rubin. "Nobody knows his timing like I do.

He calls me his insurance. If you're going to get somebody to work with you, you want somebody who knows you. I know Jack's timing. He calls me his insurance. If you’re going to get somebody to work with, you want somebody who knows you. I know Jack’s timing. When Jack says 'hum' you know that's to keep you from stepping on the next line.
"When Jack has new actors or people he doesn't know on the show this is heck of a thing to explain to somebody. You'd be surprised how many scenes an actor ruins because he moves or says something ac the wrong time. On radio, Jack would read a line and grab your arm. You didn't talk until he released you. That was if he didn't “know you."
With his hundreds of appearances on television, Rubin should be a familiar face. He is, but the faces are different. Millions of persons have seen Rubin in hundreds of different ways.
“I do everything,” he said played. “I’ve played 40 or 50 Italians, 20 or 30 Germans—all kinds of guys, including cops and robbers.
“People see me on the street and they say, ‘I’ve seen that guy.’ But they’ve been looking through beards and moustaches.
Rubin's friendship with Benny goes back to more than 40 years. As long as Benny has a show, Rubin will have some work on it.
“This is the big point, the trust,” said Rubin. “That’s the big thing in this racket.”
The comedians who appear with Rubin had better trust him. There are times when they’re not certain what he’ll do. But they know it’ll be good.
Jerry Lewis once hired him to play a waiter. Jerry instructed other actors in the scene about their action. Rubin he left to his own design.
Rubin once showed up on a Jack Benny episode and the boss asked, “Who are you today?”
Jack might not have known who Rubin was that day but he knew what he was—laugh insurance.

There was a time Jack Benny worked for Rubin, in a round-about way. This is from George Pratt’s column in the Hollywood Citizen-News of June 2, 1961.

Comic Rubin Has Memories Aplenty
By GEORGE PRATT
Citizen-News Staff Writer
Comic Benny Rubin scoffed when we asked him if he was adverse to admitting he’d been a movie featured performer in the mid-30’s, in the likes of “George White’s Scandals,” with Alice Faye and Jimmy Dunn, and “Go Into Your Dance” with Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler.
“What do you think I am, a juvenile lead?” he tossed back on the Jack Benny set at the Cahuenga lot of Desilu’s where he was awaiting the day’s shooting on Jack’s show.
“I earned these grey hairs in show business, and it’s all there in the billings down through the years. Why should I try to avoid dating myself, when it’s all down in the ads?”
And on Benny the grey hair looks remarkably good.
REMARKABLE MEMORY
His remarkable memory and flair for facts from the past were graphically exhibited as he ran through the list of “Leading Men” and “Comedians” who played in the mid-30’s in the first Rubin-promoted ball game for the benefit of Duarte Hospital, which grew to become The City of Hope.
The leading men had Charles Winninger, John Boles and Vince Flaherty’s brother as pitchers, Jimmy Cagney caught, Lee Tracy was first base, Dick Powell second, Bing Crosby was short, Dick Arlen third and George Raft, Clark Gable and Dennis Morgan were the outfield.
The comics, Benny recalls, had “me and Maxie Rosenbloom as pitchers, Buster Keaton caught, Harry Ruby played first, Joe E. Brown second, Vince Barnett was short, and Jackie Coogan third. The outfield had Andy Devine, Jack Benny and George Jessel.”
Umpires were Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff and Jimmy Gleason. And Arthur Treacher served tea to the hurlers!

Wonderful names of some wonderful performers of the mid-thirties.
Hear Benny tell a couple of gems from his memory vista:
“I needed some music for an idea I had and this young fellow said he’d tackle it for me. I had only a few bucks over $600 in the bank and he offered to do it for $200. Well, when he brought it along, he’d done such a fine job with the assignment that I dumped the $600 in his hands and told him he’d earned it. The 19-year-old was a lad named Bob Mitchum.”
And when Benny was doing the act for which Mitchum wrote the music, breaking it in at the Golden Gate in San Francisco, he went to luncheon with Lucille Ball and they dropped to the Bal Tabarin for a bit of entertainment. A little performer, all of 15, on the show caught Benny’s eye and he induced Lucille to send for the girl and her mother.
THRILLED GIRL
That’s when Benny and Lucille thrilled a girl named Ann Miller, who continued with her dancing to gain world fame through Hollywood’s cinema musicals where her tappings were viewed by audiences all over our planet.
Benny has a jillion yarns like these. He can tell you about the four-a-day, the pit band leader at Seattle’s Orpheum—Tiny Burnett—or the dressing facilities at Keokuk.
Rubin has made his excursions into bond selling and other attempts at commerce, but his heart beat is the variable tattoo of show biz, the game where he started as a hoofer and varied his routines to include tooting a trombone, doing comic roles—countless in number—to now as a foil for Jack Benny.

Rubin wrote a reminiscence in 1972 called Come Backstage with Me. He admitted he wasn’t too concerned about whether his tales were accurate.

Dialects were a specialty for Rubin, Jewish and many others. He griped in public that his career was hurt badly in 1938 by movie industry moguls getting together (so he says) to eliminate all dialect comedy; he blamed Walter Winchell, too. Jack Benny didn’t hire Rubin on radio to do a Jewish character. After Sam "Schlepperman" Hearn left, Jack brought in Artie Auerbach to play the pleasant hot dog vendor Mr. Kitzel. In a 1963 interview, Rubin said he never liked Kitzel. “I thought it was phony,” he told columnist Hal Humphrey. Auerbach was dead by this time and couldn’t defend his character, who popped in on Benny for 11 years (including a TV episode after Auerbach’s death in 1957). Listeners and viewers evidently disagreed with Rubin. If Mr. Kitzel hadn’t made a connection with the audience, Jack never would have kept bringing him back.

And Rubin rained on Benny’s season-ending party after the 1964-65 season (ad for one show to the right), as he wrote in a feature story for TV Guide at the time. He didn’t stay for it because he couldn’t handle NBC’s cancellation of Jack’s show, feeling his Benny buddy had nothing to celebrate. The idea that Jack wanted to throw the party to thank his cast and crew didn’t seem to dawn on Rubin.

Whether Rubin was bitter is hard to tell. Jack Benny was able to adjust to changes in the entertainment business and maintain his stardom. Benny Rubin was not.

Richard Simmons and the Dancing Powder Puffs

50 years ago, Richard Simmons tried for television stardom.

It took a few more years. He appeared on the daytime talk shows—Merv, Mike Douglas, Dinah—in the late ‘70s (as well as the soap General Hospital) before becoming a star in the Golden Age of Infomercials, slickly pushing his “Deal-A-Meal” and those “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” videos. He won Emmys for his own daytime show. He visited Late Night With David Letterman, with a host who seemed to love demeaning him, as the audience awwwed in sympathy. It was all a ruse, of course. One thing Richard Simmons knew how to do was promote himself.

Despite being ultra-hyper, even in conversation, he came across as sincere, certainly with women with whom he empathised on camera. He made them feel he wanted to be their friend and if no one else supported them, he did.

However, long before this, he received periodic mentions in the Fashion section of the Los Angeles Times. Here’s an unbylined clipping from Aug. 26, 1974.

SOUND LIKE A MILLION?—The audience, sitting at cafe-style tables in a KTLA studio, slowly enunciated in unison, "I looooovvvvve Gucci." And then, again to its own wonderment, "I looooovvvvve Sears."
The home audience was asked to compare body skin with facial skin (“skin is the largest organ of the body”) in order to see what exposure to the elements can do, and a member of the studio audience was picked to come up on stage, clean her face and then was largely ignored.
The occasion was the taping of "Look Like a Million," a daytime beauty show pilot developed and hosted by Richard Simmons. If it sells, look for it to have the greatest camp following since Queen for a Day and You Bet Your Life.
Simmons, 25, wanted to open the show with a group of dancers costumed as powder puffs. A huge lipstick case would wheel forward, he said between taping segments, then it would twirl up and he'd be the lipstick. The idea cost too much—for now at least.
Simmons was able to get Sally Struthers, however, to join him for most of the show, and Vidal Sassoon and his wife Beverly turned out in the studio audience. Larry Van Nuys, the star of KTLA's Help Thy Neighbor, which tapes in a nearby studio, also watched the proceedings and predicted the show would do well in Los Angeles and New York.

His next venture found itself the subject of the same column in the Nov. 14, 1975 edition of the Times:

STRETCH AND SALAD—Despite the shower rooms, wall-to-wall exercise mirrors and plush carpeting—it's hardly your everyday inner city health spa.
In the first place, Barbra Streisand and Cher are among the body buddies stretching their muscles there. Secondly, the whole center is located in an old warehouse next to Woniier Bread in an industrial section of Beverly Hills. And thirdly, it won't do you any good to take an exercise class and then sneak off to La Scala and gorge those pounds back. They've put the health food restaurant next door to the gym just to make sure you stay in shape.
Even the name has been given a different flavor. They call the exercise-gym the Anatomy Asylum, the health food section Ruffage.
"Because we're in Beverly Hills, people automatically think we're just another phony hangout for the beautiful people," says co-owner Richard Simmons, a kind of freaked-out Jack LaLanne who credits exercise with having helped him reduce from 270 to his present 140 pounds. "I don't want to look in the paper and see a caption that says Liza Minnelli at Ruffage. She's here. But that's not the point. The point is, if you don't stay in shape—you're not beautiful."
Simmons (“Just like the mattress, honey”) teaches the beginners. But the contours of Raquel Welch and other long-time exercisers fall into the hands of Kim Lee. If his work on Cher's torso isn't recommendation enough, Lee is also a look-alike for his cousin, the late kung cult figure Bruce Lee.
Prices are steep. The introductory 10-time exercise class rate runs $100. (The salads are extra). After that a one-hour exercise class levels to $4. What do you get there that you can't get for $100 a year at your local “Y”?
"It's a matter of life-style," says Simmons. "Some people like to buy a dress at Lerner's. Some people prefer Bonwit's. In our field, we're the Bonwit's."

What was Simmons doing before this? The Oakland Tribune devoted almost a half page to him on May 11, 1972 (photo to the right) in a story headlined “Metamophosis of a Formerly Fat Singing Waiter” where he spoke of his mother being in the Follies and his father singing on either stage or film, how he had a scholarship to study at the University of Florence, and gained weight (268 pounds) because he could make more money modelling that way. When he returned from Italy and worked as a singing waiter in New York “I got the message that fat boys aren’t so hot in the U.S.” He slimmed down and found work as a training director for Coty and Dina Merrill companies.

In Lois Kwan’s column in the March 4, 1973 Times, she reviews a restaurant in the Beverly Comstock Hotel and mentions “a maître d’hotel and an effervescent catalyst named Richard Simmons.”

While it’s not safe to assume two people with the same name are the same person, could there have possibly have been two effervescent Richard Simmons in the same city? If nothing else, Richard Simmons was one of a kind.

He has died a day after his birthday. Age 76.