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Herbert John "Jackie" Gleason (February 26,
1916 – June 24, 1987) was an American comedian and actor often said to
have been one of America's most beloved television entertainers in the
medium's coming-of-age years.
Gleason is best-remembered for his brashly
versatile comedy and swift ad-libbing, particularly in the comic portrait of his
Chauncey Street, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn neighborhood in The Honeymooners as bus
driver Ralph Kramden.
Gleason repeatedly proved himself to be as capable
a dramatic actor as he was a comedian, in films like Rod Serling's Requiem for a
Heavyweight (1962), Soldier in the Rain (1963) with Steve McQueen, and his
Oscar-nominated performance opposite Paul Newman in The Hustler (1961).
****
The
early years
Gleason grew up as an only child, abandoned by his
father, and raised by a loving, but work-worn and troubled mother, who died when
he was 16.
He first gained recognition in the Broadway play
Follow the Girls, and simultaneously appeared in small parts in such films as
Springtime in the Rockies, Orchestra Wives (as a swing band bassist---the band
itself was played by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra), and Navy Blues, but he did
not make a mark in Hollywood in his early years. During the 1940's, Gleason
developed a very popular nightclub act which included both comedy and music.
After the last nightly show, Gleason, already known as "The Great One", was
famous for presiding over all night parties in the hotel suite where he lived.
Gleason would sit in a chair, flanked by beautiful women, and swap stories and
jokes with the crowd of famous, infamous, and unkown. It was said that he paid
special attention to members of the armed forces who stopped by, making sure
that they had drinks and "dates". It was also said that Gleason was usually the
only one left standing after these parties. This was a tradition that seems to
have endured throughout Gleason's career.
In 1949, he played the role of Chester A. Riley on
the short-lived first television version of radio comedy hit The Life of Riley.
William Bendix originated the role on radio, but was unable to take the
television role, at first, due to film commitments (including, ironically, a
film version of The Life of Riley). Gleason's version was favorably reviewed but
was not high in the ratings. Bendix would revive the show successfully in the
early 1950s, but Gleason's nightclub act drew attention from New York City's
inner circle -- and the small DuMont Television Network.
Early
career in television
Gleason was hired as the host of DuMont's Cavalcade
of Stars and fashioned a variety hour balanced between glitzy entertainment and
his surprising comic versatility. He became one of the few major hits DuMont
would enjoy from 1950 to 1952. With splashy dance numbers framing the show,
Gleason began to develop sketch characters that would stay with him for many
years, and in 1952 he accepted an offer to move his extravaganza -- renamed The
Jackie Gleason Show -- to CBS, where he became the nation's number two-rated TV
show behind another CBS institution, I Love Lucy.
On CBS, he amplified the glitz with splashier,
Busby Berkley-inspired opening numbers by the precision-choreographed June
Taylor Dancers, before an opening monologue punctuated by a cigarette in one
hand and his incessant sipping from a coffee cup. (Gleason always implied that
there was something stronger than coffee in the cup; it was generally reported
to be champagne.) Then, he would shuffle comically toward the wing ("A little
travelin' music, Sam!", he'd call to bandleader Sammy Spear), or thrust his hand
toward the wing and hail, "And awa-a-aay we go!" The phrase became one of his
trademarks, and a national catchphrase.
Gleason, in real life, was a hard drinker, but he
once told of a six-hour talk session with Richard Nixon where both drank Scotch.
At the end of the evening, Gleason said he could barely stagger from the room,
while Nixon walked out "as straight as a soldier".
Gleason's comic characters included the understated
Poor Soul, played silently and capable of coming to grief or to surprised
pleasure in the most otherwise mundane scenarios; loquacious Joe the Bartender;
Rum Dum (Gleason's body and eye movements when doing this character had to be
seen to be appreciated); and the character a biographer cited as Gleason's
personal favorite, Reginald Van Gleason III, a top-hatted millionaire with an
exaggerated brush mustache and perpetual self-satisfied look, who was never shy
about savouring the good life, and never very far from liquid refreshment.
The
Honeymooners
By far his most popular character with his audience
was blustery bus driver Ralph Kramden, who lived with his tart but tenderhearted
wife, Alice Kramden, in a two-room Brooklyn walkup, one apartment beneath his
best friend, sense-challenged sewer worker Ed Norton ("The first time I took the
test for the sewer I flunked---I couldn't even float!") and his likewise tart
wife, Trixie. Norton was portrayed from the start by Art Carney. Probably
inspired by the earlier radio hit The Bickersons and largely drawn from
Gleason's harsh Brooklyn childhood ("Every neighborhood in Brooklyn had its
Ralph Kramdens," he said years later), these sketches became known as The
Honeymooners, and customarily centered around Ralph Kramden's incessant
get-rich-quick schemes, the tensions between his ambitiousness and Norton's
scatter-brained aid and comfort, and the inevitable clash ("Bang! Zoom! Off to
the moon, Alice!") when sensible Alice tried to pull his crazy, harebrained head
back down from the clouds ("I got a BIIIIIG mouth!").
The Honeymooners first turned up on Cavalcade of
Stars on October 5th, 1951, with Carney as Norton (although Carney played a cop
in the first sketch) and spirited character actress Pert Kelton as Alice.
Critics note that the Honeymooners sketches with Kelton were much darker and
fiercer than the subsequent softened and more sentimental versions with Audrey
Meadows, who is currently the most-remembered Alice due to the saturation
telecasting for decades of her version; the Kelton sketches were considered
"lost" until the 1980s. In the two later versions (first with Audrey Meadows as
Alice, then Sheila MacRae playing the part in the hour-long musicals of the
1960s), Gleason's character had a beautiful, young wife, but in the original
sketches with Kelton, Ralph is a frustrated fat man with a middle-aged
battle-axe wife whose looks have faded, and the intense arguments between the
two could be harrowingly realistic.
When The Jackie Gleason Show—including The
Honeymooners— moved to CBS, Kelton had been blacklisted and wasn't part of the
move. Her name had turned up in Red Channels, the book that listed and described
supposed Communists and Communist sympathisers in television and radio. Gleason
reluctantly let her leave the cast, with a cover story for the media that she
had "heart trouble." He also turned down a younger, prettier actress sent to
audition to replace Kelton, but according to legend, the actress then sent him
pictures of herself dressed as a frump with little makeup -- and Gleason
relented, especially when he did not recognise her the second time around. Thus,
Audrey Meadows became the new Alice and made the role her own.
Rounding out the cast with an understated but
effective role, was Joyce Randolph as Trixie. (Elaine Stritch had played Trixie
as a formidably tall and stunning blonde in the first sketch, but was replaced
by the infinitely more everyday-seeming Randolph the following week, lest Ed
Norton's wife be more beautiful than Ralph's).
The Honeymooners sketches were so popular that
Gleason decided to gamble on making it a separate series entirely in 1955.
Perhaps surprisingly, The Honeymooners so-called Classic 39 episodes—filmed with
a new DuMont process, Electronicam, which allowed live television to be
preserved on high-quality film—did not catch on in the ratings. It would be
years later, in repeated syndication runs, that the Classic 39 would become
television icons.
Today, a life-sized statue of Gleason in full
uniform as Ralph Kramden the bus driver stands outside the Port Authority Bus
Terminal in New York City.
Musical
endeavors
Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Gleason
enjoyed a secondary career in recorded music, lending his name to a series of
best-selling "mood music" record albums for Capitol Records. Gleason could not
read or write music in a conventional sense; he composed melodies in his head
and transcribed them with the help of an able staff, led by arranger Sammy
Spear. He did likewise with the well-remembered themes of both The Jackie
Gleason Show ("Melancholy Serenade") and The Honeymooners ("You're My Greatest
Love"). There has been some controversy over the years as to how much credit
Gleason should have received for the finished products, but if Gleason indeed
conducted the orchestra during the recordings (he was credited as doing so), he
had a fine sensibility as a conductor.
Some of that music endures. "It's Such a Happy
Day," which often turned up as a theme behind numerous among Gleason's
television sketches, turned up as the music for a jaunty scene involving heart
transplant recipient Minnie Driver bicycling around her Chicago neighborhood in
the 2000 film Return to Me.
The
American Scene Magazine
Gleason restored his original variety hour --
including The Honeymooners -- in 1956, but abandoned the show in 1957, leaving
weekly television for a year. He returned in 1958 with a half-hour show that
featured Buddy Hackett (Carney and Meadows were not part of this program). But
this version of the Gleason show did not catch on.
His next foray into television was with a game
show, You're in the Picture, which survived its disastrous premiere episode only
because of Gleason's hilarious on-the-air apology in the following week's time
slot. For the rest of the scheduled run, the program became a talk show (again
named "The Jackie Gleason Show").
In 1962, he resurrected his variety show with a
little more splashiness (the June Taylor Dancers' routines became more
elaborately choreographed and costumed than before) and a new hook -- a
fictitious magazine through whose format Gleason trotted out his old characters
in new scenarios. He also added another catchphrase, "How Sweet It Is!" (which
he first uttered in a 1962 film, Papa's Delicate Condition), which rivaled "And
awa-a-ay we go!" for its entry into the American vernacular.
The Jackie Gleason Show: The American Scene
Magazine was a hit and endured in the format for four seasons. A staple sketch
was Joe the Bartender speaking to the unseen Mr. Dennehy (the viewer) about an
article he read in the fictitious magazine, holding a copy across the bar, until
the pair were joined by veteran comic and Irish baritone Frank Fontaine as
off-centered Crazy Guggenheim. His cracked banter with Joe inevitably ended with
Fontaine displaying his well-trained singing voice. (Fontaine had played the
same sort of goofy Brooklynite character, then called "John L. C. Sivoney," on
radio's The Jack Benny Program; his wider exposure on Gleason's show resulted in
the release of his recordings of 'old standards' on the ABC/Paramount record
label.) Comedian Alice Ghostley was another regular cast member.
Gleason finally abandoned the fictitious magazine
format and re-named his program The Jackie Gleason Show. The Honeymooners was a
regulation entry. The show moved from New York to Miami Beach in 1964,
reportedly because Gleason wanted year-round access to the golf course at nearby
Inverrary, where he built his final home. But the growing popularity of The
Honeymooners compelled Gleason to stage periodic, hour long musical versions of
the sketch, sometimes recycling vintage plots from the live shows of the 1950s.
By 1968-69, Gleason was doing almost nothing but hourlong Honeymooners musicals.
Though well received, there were fans who believed that Sheila McRae as the new
Alice Kramden and Jane Kean as the new Trixie Norton, talented as they were,
were not the equal of Audrey Meadows and Joyce Randolph.
End of
television career
At first, "The Honeymooners" musicals helped push
The Jackie Gleason Show back into the top five in the ratings, but the audience
began to decline after a few years. In the last original Honeymooners episode
aired on CBS, "Operation Protest," Ralph Kramden encounters the youth-protest
movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The times were changing, and
Gleason's program was showing its age. CBS cancelled Red Skelton and Ed Sullivan
around the same time. These series had become expensive to produce, and played
more to older adults and children than to the teen and young adult demographic
advertisers and networks increasingly wanted.
Roles
in drama
Gleason had a dramatic side that the comic pathos
of the Poor Soul hinted at often enough. He earned acclaim for live television
drama performances in The Laugh Maker on CBS' Studio One (where he played a
semi-autobiographical role as fictional TV comedian Jerry Giles), and in William
Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, also for CBS, as an episode of the legendary
anthology Playhouse 90.
Gleason's greatest dramatic acclaim, however, came
for his portrayal of Minnesota Fats in the 1961 Paul Newman movie The Hustler,
in which Gleason -- who had hustled pool growing up in Brooklyn -- made his own
shots on the table. He earned an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting
Actor for the role. Gleason next garnered excellent reviews as a boxer's
beleaguered manager in the movie version of Rod Serling's Requiem for a
Heavyweight (1962), also featuring Anthony Quinn, Mickey Rooney, and a very
young Cassius Clay. He topped off a trio of powerhouse dramas as a world-weary
Army sergeant, with Steve McQueen supporting him as a Gomer Pyle-like private,
in Soldier in the Rain (1962). Tuesday Weld played Gleason's romantic interest.
Gleason did not make that kind of impact on film
again for over a decade, when he appeared as vulgar sheriff Buford T. Justice in
the popular Smokey and the Bandit film series. His career from that point
forward would yield a handful of notably good performances (especially with Sir
Laurence Olivier in the cable television special drama, Mr. Halperin and Mr.
Johnson) and a hit supporting role that kept him working but wasn't really close
to his former best (the Tom Hanks feature, Nothing in Common (1986), featuring
Gleason as an infirm, somewhat Archie Bunkeresque character).
The
Honeymoon Was Not Over
Gleason did two Jackie Gleason Show specials for
CBS during the '70s, which are said to have included "Honeymooners segments"
(and in a non-Kramden sketch, Reggie Van Gleason is revealed as an alcoholic).
After his CBS contract expired, Gleason signed with
NBC and many series ideas were floated but the only visible result of this
interlude was a series of "Honeymooners" specials on ABC, which grew out of
discussions that began when Gleason and Audrey Meadows were reunited on an NBC
Dean Martin roast. Gleason, Meadows, Art Carney and Jane Kean appeared in four
Honeymooners specials on ABC during the second half of the 1970s, and during the
'80s -- with Carney -- Gleason made a made-for-television movie, Izzy and Moe.
In 1985, three decades after the debut of the
filmed Honeymooners, Gleason revealed that he had carefully preserved kinescopes
of his live 1950s CBS programs in a vault for future use. These "Lost Episodes,"
as they came to be called, first aired on the Showtime cable network in 1985 and
were later syndicated to local TV stations. Some of them include what amount to
rough drafts of what became better-developed Classic 39 themes, but they proved
an invaluable addition to the show's legacy.
Later
life and death
Nothing in Common proved to be Gleason's final film
role. While he made the film, he was already fighting colon cancer and liver
cancer. He was hospitalised at one point in 1986-87 but checked himself out and
died quietly at his Inverrary, Florida home 24 June 1987. He was 71 years old.
In the year of his death, Miami Beach honored his contributions to the city and
its tourism by renaming the Miami Beach Auditorium -- where he had performed The
Jackie Gleason Show -- as the Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts.
Tributes
On June 30, 1988, the Sunset Park Bus Depot in
Brooklyn was renamed the Jackie Gleason Bus Depot in honor of the native
Brooklynite. (Ralph Kramden worked for the fictional Gotham Bus Company.) A
statue of Gleason as Ralph in his bus driver's uniform was dedicated in August,
2000 in New York City, by the cable TV channel TV Land. The statue is located at
40th Street and 8th Avenue, at the entrance of the Port Authority of New York
and New Jersey bus terminal. Another such statue stands at the Academy of
Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in North Hollywood, California,
showing Gleason in his famous "And awa-a-ay we go!" pose.
Local signs on the Brooklyn Bridge, which indicate
to the driver that they are now entering Brooklyn, have the Gleason phrase "How
Sweet It Is!" as part of the sign.
A television movie called Gleason was aired by CBS
on October 13, 2002, taking a deeper look into Gleason's life; it took liberties
with some of the Gleason story but featured his troubled home life, a side of
Gleason few really saw. He had two daughters by his first wife (Gleason's
daughter Linda is the mother of actor Jason Patric); they divorced, and Gleason
endured a brief second marriage before finding a happy union with his third
wife, June Taylor's sister Marilyn. The film also showed backstage scenes from
his best-known work. Brad Garrett, from Everybody Loves Raymond, portrayed
Gleason (after Mark Addy had to drop out) and Garrett's height (6'8") created
some logistical problems on the sets, which had to be specially made so that
Garrett did not tower over everyone else.
In 2003, after an absence of more than thirty
years, the color, musical versions of The Honeymooners from the second Jackie
Gleason Show in Miami Beach were returned to television over the Good Life TV
cable network. In 2005, a movie version of The Honeymooners appeared in
theatres, with a twist--a primarily African-American cast, headed by Cedric the
Entertainer. (There had been reports a few years earlier that Roseanne co-star
John Goodman would bring The Honeymooners to film, playing Ralph, but these
plans never materialized). This version, however, bore only a passing
resemblance to Gleason's original series and was widely panned by critics.
TV work
Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson (1983)
Izzy and Moe (1985)
Filmography
Navy Blues (1941)
Steel Against the Sky (1941)
All Through the Night (1942)
Lady Gangster (1942)
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1942)
Larceny, Inc. (1942)
Escape from Crime (1942)
Orchestra Wives (1942)
Springtime in the Rockies (1942)
The Desert Hawk (1950)
The Hustler (1961)
Gigot (1962) (also writer)
Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962)
Papa's Delicate Condition (1963)
Soldier in the Rain (1963)
Skidoo (1968)
How to Commit Marriage (1969)
Don't Drink the Water (1969)
How Do I Love Thee? (1970)
Mr. Billion (1977)
Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
Smokey and the Bandit II (1980)
The Toy (1982)
The Sting II (1983)
Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 (1983)
Nothing in Common (1986)
Stage
appearances
Keep Off the Grass (1940)
Artists and Models (1943)
Follow the Girls (1944)
Along Fifth Avenue (1949)
Take Me Along (1959)
Record
albums
Music for Lovers Only (1953)
Music, Martinis and Memories (1954)
Lover's Rhapsody (1955)
Music to Make You Misty (1955)
Tawny (1955)
And Awaaay We Go! (1955)
Romantic Jazz (1955)
Music to Remember Her (1955)
Lonesome Echo (1955)
Music to Change Her Mind (1956)
Night Winds (1956)
Merry Christmas (1956)
Music for the Love Hours (1957)
Velvet Brass (1957)
* * * *
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