Jackie Gleason
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).
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.
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 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.
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Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows in a staged publicity shot for The Honeymooners. While Gleason's Ralph Kramden was a bus driver, he was never seen actually driving a bus in the series. |
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
â€"including The Honeymooners
â€" 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 episodesâ€"filmed with a new DuMont process,
Electronicam, which allowed live television to be preserved on high-quality filmâ€"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.
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.
Gleason restored his original variety hour 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.
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.
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 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).
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 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.
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 as the
Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts.
|
Sign welcoming drivers to Brooklyn |
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.
Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson (
1983)
Izzy and Moe (
1985)
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)
Keep Off the Grass (
1940)
Artists and Models (
1943)
Follow the Girls (
1944)
Along Fifth Avenue (
1949)
Take Me Along (
1959)
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)
*[
1] Jackie Gleason discography
*[
2] Internet Obituary for Jackie Gleason
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3]
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4]
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5]
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Jackie Gleason's Gravesite
