Martian Through Georgia

There are places in the Chuck Jones cartoon Martian Through Georgia where the backgrounds look like they came from a UPA cartoon where a mad scientist injected the surroundings with some evil serum and the ornateness of the buildings couldn’t stop growing. Or maybe Maurice Noble and Phil DeGuard were injected with something.



Here, Jones and Noble use colour for effect, not for changing mood.



About the best you can say for this cartoon is it’s different. Well, in a way. The (non?)-hero is a Chuck Jones grinchy green. The facial expressions are pure ‘60s Jones. And the cartoon ends with one of those heart-shapes that Jones and his storyman-du-jour plopped onto the end of some of final Pepe Le Pew cartoons to show that romance is the end result of obsessive unwanted advances.

The Life and Times of Jack Benny, Part 3 of 6

Achieving national fame in vaudeville must have been quite a feat.

There was no radio (let alone television) to give someone national publicity. About all an act could hope for when it arrived in town for a week was its name in a theatre newspaper ad was recognised from the last time it played.

The term “big time” comes from vaudeville. Circuits were known as “times,” such as the Gun Sun Time. The biggest one on the West Coast was the Orpheum circuit, which was affiliated with B.F. Keith’s in New York. Jack Benny played not only the Orpheum, but the Keith’s, and other interrelated circuits (WVMA was one).

It was during a stop at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver that Jack first met Mary Livingstone at her parents home on Nelson Street a half block from Denman. The house was torn down to make room for ‘70s style low-rise apartments. They re-met a number of years later at a May Co. store in Los Angeles, which provided jokes galore for the Benny radio show.

Jack’s later vaudeville career and courtship, such as it was, of Mary was the subject of the third part of a series in the New York Post, published February 5, 1958. As a side note, the only time the Marx Bros. and Jack appeared on the same bill at the Orpheum in Vancouver was during the week of March 8, 1920. Jack was still billed as Ben K. Benny then.

We’ll have part four next week.

The Jack Benny Story
By DAVID GELMAN and MARCY ELIAS
ARTICLE III
One advantage the old-time vaudeville performer enjoyed over his television descendants was that he didn't have to wait long for his rating. Usually he got it by direct vocal reaction.
Among the toughest of audiences was the boisterous brotherhood of park-bench warmers who frequented the Academy of Music on 14th St. back in the Twenties, mainly as a temporary refuge from the wintry blasts along the Bowery.
Jack Benny once played an engagement of historic brevity at the Academy. Reluctant to accept a booking there because of its reputation, Jack was finally persuaded to give it a try by the manager of the theater who loved his act.
On a particularly cold Saturday night, when the theater was thick with the smoke of hand-rolled cigarets, Benny emerged from the wings, fiddle in hand, and began walking toward mid-stage in his rather elaborate gait, at the same time uttering his familiar opening line, "Hello, folks."
He hadn't gone very far before the catcalls and lip-razzes were rattling the ancient timbers of the Academy. It didn't give Benny a moment's pause. In fact he kept right on walking, said, "Good night, folks," and disappeared into the opposite wing. The catcalls turned to cheers but Benny never returned to find out whether the crowd was applauding his presence of mind or his departure.
He had other traumatic encounters, like the time in Sioux City when a man stood up in the middle of one of his monologues, shouted, "You stink!" and stamped noisily out of the auditorium. But for the most part, Benny found his audiences receptive to what was then considered the advanced humor of the stand-up, wise-cracking comedian.
The Big Time
For an approximation of what the act was like, one would have to catch Henny Youngman, the last of the comic fiddlers, whose stock performance is a kind of concerto for violin and voice in which he continually interrupts his playing, creating a frustration for which the joke is an immediate catharsis.
It calls for a certain precision of timing and it was probably here that Benny developed the complicated rhythm of exclamations, gasps and pauses that distinguish his comedy talent.
The other well-known Benny mannerism—the vague, loose-jointed waving of the hands—developed as a sort of memorial pantomime after he gave up the fiddle as a full-time prop. Jack's longtime friend (and present employe) Benny Rubin recalls:
"When Jack started doing a single he would come on stage with the violin tucked under his left arm and the bow dangling from his right. He did that for years but then he decided not to play the fiddle until the end of his act. He would give the fiddle and the bow to the conductor before the show and then take it from him later as if he were borrowing it."
The new routine, however, left Jack's hands hanging in midair for a good part of his act. For the next few months he experimented unsuccessfully first with a straw hat and a cigar and then with his hand in his pockets.
"From that point on," said Rubin, "Jack started waving his hands in front of him, or touching his nose with his left hand and holding his right palm out where the fiddle neck used to be."

"Very few performers can work without something in their hands," explains George Burns, who still does monologues while scrutinizing a cigar held between his thumb and index finger.
Benny, with or without a handprop, never lacked for bookings on the big-time vaudeville circuits. He toured back and forth across America and parts of Canada with a varying success that depended on the sophistication of his audiences. He was the smart young comic of his day.
Twice he played the Palace, the end-all of show business, and twice, stricken with stage-fright, he flopped resoundingly. On his third try he employed the novel approach of kidding the other acts on the bill. This time he was a smash, and before long he was commanding an upper-bracket fee of $350 a week as a suave variety emcee.
First Meeting
Not the least reason for his sudden eminence was the fact that by the primitive economic standards of the 20s, Jack was among the best-paying employers of gag writers, and top men in the field like Al Bosberg generally gave him first crack at their services. His respect and consideration for good writers was simply another aspect of the over-all professionalism that provided the foundation for his remarkable durability in the business.
As a prosperous, handsome young bachelor ("He was gorgeous in those days," says Mrs. Jesse Block, the "Sully" of Block and Sully), Jack quite naturally had a devoted following among the ladies, and quite naturally, he returned the compliment.
In 1921, Jack was playing Vancouver as the second half of a bill that starred the four Marx Bros. In Vancouver at the time lived an attractive 13-year-old girl named Sadie Marks, whose father was the head of the city's Jewish temple. It was Mr. Marks' custom to invite visiting actors of the faith to share the Sabbath dinner at his home each Friday night. Accordingly he asked the Marx boys to the house and they in turn asked Benny to join them.
Little Sadie, who today of course is better known as Mary Livingstone Benny, still speaks of that first encounter with her future husband with visible resentment.
"I've never forgotten the one remark I overheard him make to, I think, Zeppo," she said. "He said, 'Why did you bring me here with all these kids?' I don't know what he expected ... Dames, or something."
As a matter of fact Jack today indicates he was expecting dames or better. Apparently, he was under the impression that his friends were taking him to a less legitimate establishment. In any case, the only other thing Sadie, or Mary, recalls about the evening is that Jack "left very fast."
"A few nights later I went with a bunch of kids to see Jack at the theater in town and I wouldn’t let any of them laugh at him because I was so angry at the remark he'd made. I told myself then that the next time I met him I’d never let him forget it. "
Mary didn’t meet Jack again for six years. By then her family had moved to Los Angeles where she was working in the hosiery department of the May Company. Her sister Babe, who had married an actor, began badgering her about "a guy named Jack Benny they knew who was handsome, wonderful and talented and she wanted me to meet him."
Babe finally arranged a meeting but Jack was with another girl and Mary accompanied them to dinner as a fifth wheel.
The next day Jack turned up at Mary's hosiery counter and asked her for a date.
"I liked him," Mary said. "I remembered we'd met when I was a kid but I didn't tell him that then, He was very handsome, he was fun and a good dancer, and he was in show business, a combination I'd never seen close up before."
"I liked her a lot," said Benny, "because she had a great sense of humor and we had a lot of fun together. I decided then that if I ever got married I'd marry that girl."
There followed then a complicated, frequently interrupted, often long distance and by no means whirlwind courtship during which Mary broke off with her steady date, a Los Angeles lawyer, got engaged to a Seattle business man, and postponed the marriage because her family felt she was too young; Jack announced his engagement to Mary Kelly of the comedy team of Swift and Kelly after unplighting his troth to another performer, Leila Hyams, of the team of Hyams and McIntyre, and then parted company with Miss Kelly as well.
During this free-wheeling period, Jack's favorite hostelry was the Forrest Hotel, a theatrical hang-out of the day, on W. 49th St. in Manhattan. Whenever he played New York he shared an entire floor with the people who were then and are now among his closest friends: Jesse and Eva (Sully) Block, George and Gracie (Allen) Burns, Eddie and Ida Cantor, Ted and Ada Lewis, Benny and Blossom (Seeley) Fields.
"We'd all meet there after the shows we did," recalls Block, "and we'd send out to the Gaiety Delicatessen for sandwiches and soda and we'd sit around playing cards and charades far into the night.
"All we had together was laughs and that's all we wanted. We did so much laughing that the house detective used to pop in all the time and he was always disappointed because he couldn't find any liquor around."
Marriage—and Love
Into this affectionate, inbred, soft-drinking fraternity Jack eventually brought Mary, and as a non-show business initiate she showed at first little tolerance or sympathy with the group.
"Mary looked all of us over, she watched us talking show business and laughing, and she thought we were nuts," said Block.
To the outsider they were indeed a little nuts. But, possibly because their roots lay in an age when neurosis was less communicable, they stood together like a rock of stability through the next quarter century and they remain today a "unique family of entertainers, their friendship as close-knit as ever, all of them happily married for 30 years or more—a personal record in which they take frequent, pardonable pride.

Jack and Mary were married in Waukegan on Jan. 14, 1927. Moments after the ceremony was completed, Mary fainted—it was an adjustment she sometimes, made under the stress of incertitude. (Later, she occasionally fainted during rehearsals for the Benny radio broadcasts.)
Jack barely had time to revive her before he rushed off to keep an engagement at the Shubert Theater in Chicago where he was emceeing "The Great Temptations," a hit variety show of that year.
There was no honeymoon, and Mary retained for years afterwards a stubborn mistrust of show business, and a reluctance to make any concession to its demands on her husband's time. So evident was this antipathy in the beginning that most people said the marriage would not last six months.
Mary herself possibly considered that an overestimate.
"I don't know why I married Jack," she said recently. "Maybe I married him because he was an actor and he was nice, and because I wanted to have a little freedom like all 19-year-old girls. My family had been very strict with me. I had never been any place really. I know I wasn't very much in love with him. How can you be in love with anyone whom you hardly know? My love for him came after."
A year later, when they had disproved even the gloomiest prophecies, Mary let Jack in on a secret.
"She told me," Benny recalled, "'You know I met you when I was 13 years old.' When I asked her why she hadn't told me that while we were going out together, she said, 'I waited until you married me because that's my way of getting even with you for forgetting.'"
TOMORROW: The Radio Star.

Paul Terry, Poet at Heart

How things changed for Paul Terry within a few years.

In 1940, he talked to the venerable New York Times about how his cartoon studio didn’t have any stars, and he liked it that way. Within a few years, he was churning out Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle cartoons. So much for “everybody is a lot happier” with variety in cartoon characters.

The most interesting revelation in the feature story is Terry was still scoring his cartoons before a frame was drawn. On the West Coast, it was the exact opposite; Carl Stalling or Scott Bradley would score to the action on the screen (though Bradley wasn’t very impressed with the suggestions given to him by director Tex Avery). Well, interesting, too, is word that Terry’s staff spent their off-hours in his office.

This story was published on July 7, 1940.

TERRY AND THE ANIMAL KINGDOM
By THEODORE STRAUSS
UP in New Rochelle there is a film producer who rarely goes to Hollywood. He has no lot; his study is in the five floors above and below his own tenth-story office. He differs in other ways. Though his actors sometimes become temperamental and get out of hand, they never quarrel over the assignment of a role, never demand more salary or the star’s bungalow dressing room. There are, in short, an impresario’s dream of what actors should be. For the producer in this case is Paul Terry and the casts of his Terrytoons are the blithe genii that reside in the inkwells and palettes of several score artists and craftsmen. Riffing his calendar the other day, Mr. Terry by a hasty computation discovered that this year is the twenty-fifth since his first cartoon, “Little Herman,” tickled the ribs of the youngsters hastily gathered for a test preview. Reasoning that a twenty-fifth anniversary of anything—even to be alive if one considers today’s diminishing life expectancy on insurance actuarial tables—is in the nature of an event, Mr. Terry invited the press to come up and survey the progress he’s made in the interim.
Admittedly, he has come far since Winsor MacKay’s [sic] “Gertie, the Dinosaur” inspired him to give up newspaper cartoon drawing. He has come a good way since he produced fifty-two “Aesop’s Fables” a year with a staff of only nineteen men. Today, Mr. Terry produces half that number of cartoons, twelve or more in color, with an organization that numbers 125. Sound and Technicolor and other improvements have made the process more complex year by year.
* * *
For the animated cartoon is no longer a pawkish stepchild among the crafts; it has become an industry. Henry Ford has come to the subterranean smith of the black dwarfs and the workbench of Santa Claus. The muse of comic invention must sit at the assembly line. The gag men must turn out a story, the tracers and animators bent over the rows of transparent drawing boards must turn out 8,000 to 10,000 frames, the composer must write a score, and the whole dubbed, photographed and tested every two weeks. But the vagaries of the creative mind, especially the pixie-ish minds who conceive the Terrytoons, keep even mass production on an informal basis.
Take the story conference, for instance. Here a mad crew of cartoonists sit in conclave with sketch pencils and pads. No story is ever dully committed to a typewriter; every step of the outline is drawn in pictures. And as the story develops the walls are slowly covered with endless rows of rough sketches showing the opening positions in each sequence. Most of the scenes are extemporaneously acted by one of the cartoonists while another times the sequence with a stop watch. Mr. Terry is never startled if he hears a loud “quack, quack” outside his private office. He merely knows the boys are really at work.
* * *

The musical score is completed before any of the actual sequences are drawn. Timing and rhythm are of the essence of cartoon comedy; scenes are often cut or expanded to follow the score. Even the lazy peregrinations of a bee around a daisy are governed by the metronome. After the music is completed the director charts each of the sequences frame by frame and the cartoon is in the hands of the animators, the traces, the painters and the photographers in turn.
Over all this, Mr. Terry presides with the aplomb of an industrial tycoon. But he’s a poet at heart. Rufus Rooster, Lucky Duck and the others are very real to him, he admits dreamily. He was one of the first, in fact, to humanize his animal actors. And in setting his mice and hippopotami and dogs and lions on two legs, so to speak, he found a little stratum of fantasy that the camera could never challenge. Aesop, of course, had the idea first and it was that moralist with a cartoonist’s mind who inspired the 490 fables which Mr. Terry produced during ten years before 1930.
By and large, Mr. Terry’s animals stick to the characteristics which wishful human beings attribute to them. The wolf is the perennial heavy, the fox a shyster lawyer, the dog a “friendly cuss,” the grasshopper a ne’er-do-well, the spider a species of bela lugosi. Though he allows his animals some of the prerogatives of homo sapiens, Mr. Terry tries to avoid Freudian complications. A pup may suffer from an inferiority complex but never schizophrenia.
On the master drawings in which the personality is fixed by the director for the benefit of the animators one may find such annotations as these: “Turkey is a dumb, sympathetic personality; at no time is he vicious,” “Lucky Duck is good-hearted, but simple, trying like hell to make good; note pigeon toes standing or walking,” or “Indian is a goofey sort of guy, at times he becomes foxy; note low lantern jaw.” But within these idiomatic delineations the character must be consistently maintained. During conference one cartoonist may often say to another: “He (a mouse) wouldn’t do that. It’s out of character.”
* * *
During off hours the story staff pores over the volumes of fairy tales, folklore and children’s verses in Mr. Terry’s office. Though the material is rarely used directly it does refresh their inventive faculties. And Mr. Terry permits the boys to go to town on any idea if it’s amusing. He has no “stars” that he has to feature in one film after another.
“Maybe it’d be better business,” he explained. “But I used to know Bud Fisher and how he hated to sit down every day with that same pair, Mutt and Jeff. Up here we haven’t a single character that we’re stuck with. We take any idea that sounds like a laugh. We like variety and if it isn’t soundest commercially the work is a lot more fun and everybody is a lot happier. That’s very important, don’t you think so?”

Sing, Mummy

Cartoons of the early 1930s were filled with singing. At Warners, happy characters designed from interconnected circles carried on, accompanied by tunes from hit movie musicals. At Fleischer’s, musical numbers would be interrupted for incidental characters spurting out a brief gag before going away. At Van Beuren, well, the musicals were just odd and disjointed.

Magic Mummy stars Margie Hines in the title role. A Phantom-of-the-Opera-like skeleton character kidnaps a mummy and demands that she sing in a theatre filled with a skeleton audience. The audience gets into the song, using bones to play on other audience members’ heads.



The orchestra pit is really a graveyard, with ghouls rising up from the grass to play instruments.



Some poses by the unwrapped Egyptian mummy as she sings “Sing,” a 1932 song by Harold Mooney and Hughie Prince.



The cartoon stars Tom and Jerry as cops who are ordered to find whoever is stealing mummies. They try to bust the skeleton Svengali. The audience makes a break for it.



Here’s a hopping version of the song by the Dorseys.

Captain of the Keyholes

Remember how Phil De Guard’s backgrounds morphed during action from right to left in Duck Amuck? Well, it happens again in Boyhood Daze (1957), a cartoon almost choked by Maurice Noble’s stylised designs.

A paper airplane against the wallpaper becomes Ralph Phillips piloting an aircraft, and the wallpaper becomes a cloudy sky.



You want symbolism? You got symbolism. A dreamy door with a keyhole fades into a number of keyholes, as Ralph pictures himself escaping his bedroom for his imaginary world. Milt Franklyn plays Captain of the Clouds in the background.



Someone once asked me if Ralph Phillips was Chuck Jones’ answer to Gerald McBoing Boing. Hardly. Not only were the UPA backgrounds far more stripped down, Gerald was a very innocent boy. Phillips thinks he’s a little adult. Gerald wants to be a part of the world which doesn’t want him. Phillips wants to be in his own little world with him at the centre of it as champion.

This drawing just screams late-Warners Chuck Jones.



Ralph is played by Dick Beals, while Abe Levitow, Dick Thompson and Ken Harris are the animators in this short.

More Than Norton

It shouldn’t be, but it’s still a little surprising to learn Art Carney regularly appeared on radio and television before he was Ed Norton on The Honeymooners. He was a cast member on one of Henry Morgan’s radio shows as well as Morey Amsterdam’s variety series on the DuMont Network.

Before that, he was known more as an impressionist than a straight actor, a talent he never really got to exercise once he got locked into the Norton role. When Carrney died years later, it was revealed Franklin Roosevelt’s office had once asked a radio producer if Carney could stop doing his impression of FDR so people wouldn’t think the President of the U.S. was actually on the show.

Here’s a piece from Tune in, a magazine based, like Carney, out of New York. It’s from the May 1946 edition. The story is unbylined, so perhaps it’s from the CBS publicity department.

ONE OF A KIND
ART CARNEY IS THE ONLY NETWORK STAFF ACTOR
ART CARNEY is a young man with a job that many a free-lance actor would give his eyeteeth and ten years of his life to have. It is the only position of its kind existing in any of the four large networks. Art is the only actor who is a regular salaried staff member of the Columbia Broadcasting System.
As anyone who has gone through the exhausting throes of becoming a radio artist can tell you, the hardest part of attaining prominence is getting established with the network producers. It is a long tale of auditioning, getting interviews with producers and directors, and beating out a shoe leather symphony between advertising agencies and network offices. After some small encouragement, you spend all your time and ingenuity reminding the producers that you do exist and are available for a little work. When you are in demand there is a vast amount of dashing about to be done to cover your assignments at the networks. You worry about your publicity or lack of it. In some cases, an expensive item in your budget is a publicity agent who gets a fat fee for keeping your name in print.
That, in brief, is largely what the radio artist faces as he strives for success. Only Art Carney of all the legions of actors has succeeded in by-passing all that struggle.
Art has a seven year contract with CBS which requires him to appear on any of the network's sustaining programs (that is, unsponsored shows) as he is needed. For this, he is paid a regular weekly salary, In addition to this, his contract permits him to accept and be reimbursed for any roles on CBS commercial shows as long as they do not conflict with his assignments on sustainers.
So he has not only the regular weekly paycheck of which all actors dream, but also a chance to make extra money and an assurance that he will be heard with enviable regularity on the radio.
How did he get this way? Well, the secret of Art's success lies in his versatility. First of all, he is a first class mimic. His impersonations of Roosevelt, Willkie, Eisenhower, Fred Allen, Winston Churchill are masterpieces. He can master a voice imitation in as brief a space as half an hour. He actually had to do this once with a recording of Elmer Davis' voice for a role on "Report To The Nation." Then, he is a competent straight actor—from the beginning of his career—a natural for radio. He is accomplished at dialects and character roles.

How does he do financially as compared with free lance artists? Better than most of them, not quite as well as the top-flight ones. But don't forget this point—there are very few at the top and even those few have no definite static income. After all, everyone has slow weeks. Art can have a slow week and still bring home the bacon. If he does a lot of commercial shows in a week, he says, "It's just gravy for me."
Art began his career in high school. His excellent imitations merely amused his classmates but gave an elder brother Jack, a radio producer, the idea that this young fellow was meant for show business.
Jack had him audition for Horace Heidt in 1937, soon after Art was graduated from high school. He toured with the band for about four years with his own comedy act. The next two years he spent in announcing for the "Pot O' Gold" program and acting in vaudeville and the theatre in and around New York.
CBS gave Art his big break when he was hired to do an imitation of Roosevelt's voice on "Report To The Nation." Following this initial appearance, the CBS directors formed the habit of using him regularly on various shows. One October day in 1943 the attractive seven year contract was flashed before him and he wasted no time in signing it.
One of his frequent assignments was on the program called "Man Behind The Gun." Coincidentally, a man behind a gun was just the role the Army had in mind for him too, and in January 1944 he landed in the infantry. He returned to civilian life and his unique contract in November of the following year.
"Columbia Workshop," "School Of The Air," and "Behind The Scenes at CBS" are a few of the sustainers which keep Art busy. When not broadcasting he is making recordings which are put to good use in his study of voices. Newsreels, movies, and radio shows are also used as references to perfect the Carney impersonations.
Art is a fairly happy man. Only once in a while (perhaps because all actors have roving souls) does he cast a mildly envious eye at the fat roles that free lance actors can land by being available to all four networks. At present, though, he's content to be a familiar part of the CBS scene and enjoy the rare security he has attained.

A Mouse! A Dog!

One of my favourite gags in Tex Avery’s The Three Little Pups is how a hand puppet of a cat being worn by the southern wolf takes on a life of its own when it sees a mouse (a wind-up variety let loose by Droopy).



Then the “cat” sees a dog.



Heck Allen insisted he did very little to obtain a story credit on Avery’s cartoons but we’ll mention him here nonetheless. If nothing else, he encouraged Avery to spew forth with his nutty humour.

Little Roquefort

There is absolutely no doubt, even to the most casual of old animation fans, which studio this drawing came from.



Yes, the gooney expression with one eye a different size than the other could only be from a Terrytoon. Really, Jim Tyer epitomises the studio. His characters have such an odd way of squashing and stretching.

Here are drawings from a scene from Good Mouse Keeping (1952). Look how squat the mouse becomes. I can’t possibly picture an animator at MGM or Warners (and certainly not Disney) drawing character porportions anything like this.



Here are drawings from Tyer’s shrink take that later expands to a large eye.



There’s some really well-executed animation in the next scene where a glove (with Little Roquefort inside) carries a jar of paint. The glove has a jaunty hop, accompanied by a nice piece of skippy music by Phil Scheib.

Tyer and the rest of the animators were never credited on screen while Paul Terry ran the studio.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre — Charlie's Haunt

Edgar Bergen had gone full circle by 1957. He started out in nightclubs in the early '30s, became a smash on radio, segued into television with the quiz show "Do You Trust Your Wife?" and when he left the show in '57, he went back into nightclub work.

He also shot a half-hour commercial for Bell Telephone produced by Jerry Fairbanks Productions.* Charlie's Haunt seems to have been designed to show in schools to teach kids about safety. "Charlie," as you might expect, is Bergen's main dummy, Charlie McCarthy.

While Bergen stars in this, star at the beginning is Jack Benny's announcer, Don Wilson, who we first see on the phone talking to Rochester (we don't hear or see Eddie Anderson in this industrial film). He doesn't seem to know where he is but that doesn't stop him from chatting with some stranger (played by Owen Howlin, who made The Blob the next year) who weaves together stories that gets across the film's message.

Also seen at the start of this film, unless I'm mistaken, is a young Sheila Kuehl. There are a bunch of uncredited actors in this. The director is Robert Florey, who had moved into television after a long career in the movies, silent and sound.

Watch Charlie's Haunt below.

* The internet seems to think this film was made in 1950. However it is listed under "Recent Films" for Fairbanks in the Feb. 20, 1958 edition of Business Screen magazine, and Fairbanks' papers at UCLA have it in the box of scripts by Leo S. Rosencrans dated July 1, 1957-Feb. 1958.

The Life and Times of Jack Benny, Part 2 of 6

Jack Benny didn’t exist until 1920. Before that, Benny Kubelsky used several other stage monikers as he made his way from town to town on a non-stop journey to entertain.

The New York Post looked at Benny’s early years in the second of a six-part series on Benny’s life. This was published on February 4, 1958.

The Jack Benny Story
By DAVID GELMAN and MARCY ELIAS
The 1895 edition of Longman's Gazetteer of the World describes Waukegan, Ill., as a pleasure resort gurgling with mineral springs, situated on a bluff 80 feet above Lake Michigan, a favorite residence of Chicago business men, active in the manufacture of iron and steel goods, with a burgeoning population of 5,000.
No mention is made of Waukegan's most celebrated tourist attraction, but the omission is pardonable on the several grounds that Jack Benny was born only a year earlier, that the event actually took place in a hospital in Chicago, 36 miles to the south, and that his real name, Benny Kubelsky, was not calculated to make the social notes of the 19th century Midwest. The first-born of Mayer and Emma Sachs, Kubelsky, Benny grew up in fairly comfortable obscurity, disturbed only by his parents' ambitions for him as a concert violinist.
Mayer, the proprietor first of a saloon, then of a clothing store, was solvent enough to buy his son a $50 violin on Benny's sixth birthday, and while it was never quite put to the use for which it was intended, it re-paid the initial investment several thousand times over in the course of the next 58 years.
"We were not well off," Benny recalled recently, "but we weren't poor. I've always said to anyone who wanted to write about my life that I didn't have to sell newspapers barefoot in the snow. There was always money for my violin lessons and we had all the necessities."
The Violin
With a reckless disregard for the conventions of modern show business case history, he continued:
"I had a perfectly normal, pleasant middle-class childhood. We were a close and affectionate family but there was nothing unusual about that I suppose you'd describe ours as a happy home. My mother was a very sweet woman most of the time but she had a terrific temper sometimes and it was usually directed at me ... My father was a very gentle and angelic man. But my parents had nothing to do with shaping my life and neither of them had any great influence on me."

Mrs. Kubelsky's tirades were largely occasioned by Benny's unscholarly behavior at school and with the violin.
"I was very bad in school, I hated it," he said. "I had practically no education. I was disinterested . . . And," he added with the pride of the millionaire who was voted least likely to succeed, "they threw me out in the second year of high school because I skipped classes to play with the orchestra in a Waukegan movie house.
"All I was interested in doing was playing the fiddle. I always loved the violin and I was good, but I was like a golfer who would rather play than practice. I'd get bored with long exercises. As a matter of fact I enjoy practicing the violin now more than I did then."
After his premature and unceremonious departure from high school, Benny, at 15, began spending most of his time at the Barrison Theater, Waukegan's only movie, vaudeville and miscellaneous entertainment emporium.
"I was irresistibly drawn to the theater but I didn't realize it," he said. "I would do anything from being a doorman to a porter to be there."
Between assignments with the orchestra Benny did do just about everything at the theater. One week, when he was 16, the Marx Bros. played an engagement there and their mother asked Benny if he would like to join their tour as orchestra leader. The Kubelskys refused him permission to go.
On the Road
He got his second chance when the theater closed down and Cora Salisbury, a spinsterish woman in her 40s who conducted the Barrison Orchestra, offered to team up with him as a vaudeville act.
With an obviously distressing recollection of that first and final leave-taking, Benny said: "There wasn't much of a row with my parents, but there was a scene—but I went anyway."
His sister, six years younger than Benny (she is now Mrs. Florence Fenschell, wife of a Jello Co. executive in Chicago), recalls that when he announced his decision to the family, his parents were stunned and Mrs. Kubelsky bitterly accused him of using the money they had spent on his violin lessons to make himself "a clown on the vaudeville stage."
Peace was restored when Cora herself came to the house for a heart-to-heart talk with Benny's mother. "She promised mother that she would take care of Jack and I think mother consented because she had so much confidence in Miss Salisbury. But looking back on it I don't think she ever changed her mind about vaudeville. Her heart was set on my brother becoming a great violinist."
"If there is one disappointment in my life," says Benny, "It's that my mother, who died at the age of 47, died believing nothing good was happening with my life.
"My parents thought I'd never get anywhere in any business. When my mother died, I had even given up playing the violin in vaudeville to do comedy and my career was kind of at a standstill. She died disappointed. Fortunately my father did see some good come out of my comedy."
Mayer Kubelsky lived past his 80th year, and saw not merely good but fame, early retirement and winters in Miami come from his son's comedy. In his latter years he had so completely forgotten his early disappointment," Benny says, "that whenever he went to Florida, he would always make them listen to my radio shows Sunday night and if they didn't like a show he'd get very mad at them. And he'd always make them take autographed pictures of me whether they wanted them or not."
Benny Rubin remembers how he used to put up at Mr. Kubelsky's house whenever he played Waukegan.
"Jack's father was what Jack is—an angel," he said. "He was as gentle a soul as you could find. But one thing killed me, I used to get him a box seat to watch me perform and I'd work like hell out there to please him. Invariably when the show was over and I'd see Papa, I'd say, 'How didya like the show?' And just as often he'd say, 'I got a letter front Jack today ...' and go right on as if I hadn't said a word."
A year after the unlikely sounding team of Salisbury and Benny (Jack's first stage name was Ben K. Benny) took its theatrical vows, Cora was forced to return to Waukegan to care for her ailing father. Abruptly set adrift in the lowlands of vaudeville, Benny quickly attached himself to a Chicago pianist named Lyman Woods. Benny and Woods attracted considerably more attention than the earlier combination and the team got such widely scattered bookings as Seattle, Wash., and the London Palladium.
A 'Single'
But Benny and Woods were put asunder by the untimely advent of America's entrance into World War I. Benny joined the Navy and was assigned to a special services unit whose specialty was entertaining the troops.

Lost now to memory is the day when he first began mixing the violin with comedy. Various accounts have attributed this significant departure to the advice of a commanding officer, the advice of actor Pat O'Brien (no one is quite sure how he got mixed up in the thing) and to a fateful moment of stage-fright when Benny's bow-hand froze and he began telling jokes for dear life.
In any case, the doughboys soon became familiar with "Corporal Izzy There" (Benny), who usually made his entrance by asking, "How's the show going?" and when the audience replied, "Fine," he would say, "I'll fix that." It didn't lay them in the aisles but it had a certain charm.
After the war Benny went out for the first time as a single and began his real vaudeville apprenticeship on the tank-town circuit. A couple of times, when his comic invention seemed to be wearing thin, he took a stab at serious fiddling again. But the wave of the future cast him continually among comedians, an element in which he was always more at home.
His friendship with Gracie Allen and George Burns sprang up in the early Twenties, and the latter began almost immediately to exert the hypnotic power of laughter over Benny that he still retains.
"Jack has a very peculiar sense of humor off-stage," says Burns. "I remember a time he had a date with this girl who was one of Gracie's roommates [Mary Kelly]. Jack had just come in off the road and he and the girl got into a fight. The girl called him everything and started to cry just about the time the room service waiter arrived.
"So, with the tears running down her face she started ordering: large orange juice, scrambled eggs, bacon crisp, hashed brown potatoes, rye bread, large pot of coffee. And she bawled him out again when she finished ordering. All this time Jack was on the floor laughing his head off."
Once, Burns said, when he was in Chicago and Jack was playing Milwaukee, Jack sent a wire asking Burns to meet him at the Chicago station at 9 a.m. on a certain day. "I wired back, 'I'll be glad to, what time are you coming in?' He wired back, 'Be in at 9.' I wired him, 'Skip it if you don't want to tell me what time you're coming in.' Suddenly I began getting wires from people like Nora Bayes, Sophie Tucker, J. C. Flippen and Belle Baker, maybe 25 telegrams in all from all over the country, saying, 'Jack Benny will be in at 9 o'clock.'
"I didn't meet him. When Jack walked in he said, 'Why the hell didn't you meet me?' I said, 'Because I didn't know when you were coming in,' and he collapsed on the floor laughing."
Sending and receiving gag telegrams seems to have occupied at least half of Benny's time in those days. But just before Christmas in 1925 he got a wire that was in dead earnest. It was from the Vaudeville Managers Protective Assn., informing him that he had to give up the name of Ben Benny because another comic fiddler had a prior claim on a very similar name—Ben Bernie.
After a not too strenuous session of thought, he came up with the name of Jack Benny. There have been no further complaints.