Fifties (30 page)

Even on the air he often made fun of the people who ran the network. “I’m Tinken, Vice-President in Charge of No Smoking in the Halls. You sent for a Vice-President?” he would say in character. At one point, one of those vice-presidents threatened to take him off the air, so Allen had him picketed by midgets carrying signs saying
THIS NETWORK IS UNFAIR TO LITTLE PEOPLE
.

Much of his humor was topical. Of a movie star who went to church in dark glasses, Allen said, “He’s afraid God might recognize him and ask for his autograph.” It was an age when it was still permissible to poke fun at ethnic foibles. No one did this better than Fred Allen, through his cast of characters on “Allen’s Alley.” In that skit Allen, as the master of ceremonies, would venture down the alley and knock on the door of its residents: Senator Claghorn was a blowhard Southern politician; Mrs. Nussbaum was a tart Jewish skeptic with a heavy Yiddish accent; Titus Moody was a New England Yankee skinflint; and Ajax Cassidy was a professional Irishman. The entire tour lasted five minutes, one minute per character. Much of the show’s skilled writing was done by Allen himself, though later a young Columbia graduate named Herman Wouk helped out. The critical element, though, was Allen’s timing.

In Allen’s glory years, the entire nation huddled around their radios anticipating his gags and laughing almost before they were
out of his mouth. Did the newsreels do the March of Time? Allen did the “March of Trivia.” Did Major Bowes of
The Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour
make a big thing out of visiting small towns and blathering about their wondrous qualities? Then Allen lampooned him with “Admiral Crow’s Amateur Hour”: “Tonight we salute that quaint old city nestling back in those peaceful hills. The city we all love and venerate: two hundred miles of hail-fellow-well-met. Here the first eyedropper was made. Here it was that John Brundle jumped out of a window, landed on his rubber heels, and got the idea for the first pogo stick ... the first hot-dog stand not to charge for its mustard was opened here. Situated on the shores of the second largest lake in America, the home of the biggest dental floss factory in the world ... we love you ... Tonight we salute ... Tonight ... Tonight our honor city is ... (pause) Who took that slip of paper? Boy! ... Don’t stand there gaping! Get me a vice-president or an aspirin.”

Perhaps his most celebrated stunt was his bogus feud with Jack Benny, then the country’s top-rated radio comedian. It started casually enough. Allen had made a humorous remark about Benny. Benny, sensing the possibility of fresh material, picked up on it. Soon it escalated. They would appear on each other’s shows to trade insults. “You wouldn’t dare talk to me like that if my writers were here,” Benny once said. The two of them even scheduled a fight. Joe Louis, heavyweight champion of the world, appeared on Allen’s show to help him train for the bout with the dreaded Benny. A group of schoolchildren gathered outside Allen’s childhood home yelling for him to beat Benny for the good of Dorchester, Massachusetts. Eventually, the two met on Benny’s show for the big event. There was, of course, no fight, but only one program in history had been higher rated, a Roosevelt Fireside Chat.

But once television came on the scene, the end came quickly for Allen’s popularity. Perhaps, as his biographer, Robert Taylor, noted, it was the changing era. Allen’s mordant, dark humor had worked when America was on hard times; as he mocked the successful and pompous, he had touched the right nerve in the society. But as the country began to undergo unparalleled prosperity, people no longer wanted to make fun of success—they wanted to share in it. Another reason, as Allen himself noted, was that it had simply run too long. “Even without the coming of television,” he wrote, “the survey figures showed a gradual shrinking in the mass audience. The audience and the medium were both getting tired. The same programs, the same comedians, the same commercials—even the sameness was starting to look the same.”

Toward the end, he was feeling burned-out. For eighteen years he had written, produced, and acted in his own show. During the thirty-nine-week season he rarely took a day off. “A medium that demands entertainment eighteen hours a day, seven days every week has to exhaust the conscientious craftsman and performer,” he wrote. “Radio was the only profession in which the unfit could survive.”

Yet in 1948 he was at the height of his popularity. Then ABC, with nothing to lose, put a dinky show called
Stop the Music!
against him. It was an early incarnation of the game show, and it was wonderfully hokey. Bert Parks, the master of ceremonies, would play a current hit song. After a few bars of music, Parks would shout, “Stop the music!” and would call a listener at home. If the listener could identify the tune—and the musicians were not, after all, playing Mozart piano sonatas—Parks would scream again and gush forth with all the goodies the listener had just won. The nation was transfixed. Allen was appalled: “Reduced to essentials a quiz show required one master of ceremonies, preferably with prominent teeth, two underpaid girls to do research and supply the quiz questions, and a small herd of morons stampeded into the studio audience and rounded up at the microphone to compete for prizes ...” Be that as it may, it worked.
Stop the Music!
went from nothing to a 20.0 share by January 1949; Allen fell from his 1948 28.7 high to 11.2 in the same period. He tried to fight back. He arranged with an insurance company to award five thousand dollars to any potential listener of
Stop the Music!
who missed out on the phone call and the fabled prizes because he was listening to Allen. He did a skit called “Cease the Melody,” in which he handed out many prizes, and because most television sets were still in bars, the first prize was a television set, complete with a saloon and bartender to accompany it. But it was too late. The Ford Motor Company pulled its sponsorship of his show, and in a few months he was gone. James Thurber, the great American humorist, described Allen’s flight as “for me more interesting than Lindbergh’s.” His show might have lasted a little longer, Allen said afterward, but he knew it was time to quit when his blood pressure was higher than his ratings. “When television belatedly found its way into the home after stopping off too long at the tavern, the advertisers knew they had a more potent force available for their selling purposes. Radio was abandoned like the bones at a barbecue,” he wrote.

Some of the radio comedians made the transition to television; Allen did not. His humor was too dry: He had loved radio precisely because it depended on the listeners’ imagination to create a whole
world out of words. In television, he noted, that world was determined by budgets, scenic designers, and carpenters. Nor was he in good odor at NBC after more than a decade of making fun of its executives. Allen proposed a television version of “Allen’s Alley,” using the format of Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town.
It might have worked, but the executives saw it as too expensive, so they never tried it. Instead, Allen became one of several hosts for a new variety show to air against Ed Sullivan (“Sullivan,” Allen had said sardonically but prophetically, “will stay on television as long as other people have talent”). He was uncomfortable on television from the start; the technicians would hear his jokes in rehearsal and therefore not laugh when the show was live. Allen premiered in the fall of 1950; by December of that year he was gone. After he gave up his radio program, he wrote his old friend Herman Wouk, saying that he had spoken at several dinners and had written the introduction to a cookbook. “But don’t think for a minute I’m doing all this to be popular. I’m just trying to keep from being unpopular. I’m fending off oblivion.” He also described his book,
Treadmill to Oblivion,
to Wouk. It was virtually his own epitaph: “It is the story of a radio show. A radio program is not unlike a man. It is conceived. It is born. It lives through the experience that fate allots to it. Finally the program dies and like a man is forgotten except for a few people who depended upon it for sustenance or others whose lives had been made brighter because the program existed.” When he was stricken dead with a heart attack in March 1956, a certain kind of humor went with him.

There was a genteel quality to radio success. Erik Barnouw has pointed out that in 1950 there were 108 different series that had been on the radio for a decade or more, and twelve had been on for two decades or more. On television, the stakes were bigger and more volatile. In this more intimate medium, success could come (and depart) far more quickly.

As the decade started, the television map of America was a spotty affair, not improved when the Truman administration put a four-year freeze on awarding new stations. In 1953, when Dwight Eisenhower took office and ended the freeze, there were 108 stations, but only twenty-four cities had two or more. In those days the networks were patched together for a particular big event—a heavyweight fight or the World Series. Not until the fall of 1951 did the coaxial cable stretch across the country. But Americans had already
begun to adapt their habits to accommodate their favorite programs. Studies showed that when a popular program was on, toilets flushed all over certain cities, as if on cue, during commercials or the moment the program was over. Radio listenership was significantly down. People went to restaurants earlier. Products advertised on television soared in public acceptance. Book sales were said to be down. Libraries complained of diminished activity. Above all, television threatened the movie business. By 1951, cities with only one television station reported drops in movie attendance of 20 to 40 percent, and wherever television appeared, movie theaters began to close; in New York City, Erik Barnouw noted, fifty-five theaters closed by 1951 and in Southern California, 134.

The first example of the unprecedented power of television was the meteoric rise of Milton Berle. Berle was the quintessential vaudeville slapstick comic. For better or for worse, no one ever accused him of being droll. His humor was manic and often vulgar. It depended heavily on sight gags. (When Fred Allen finally bought a television set in 1950 and saw Berle, he was appalled by what he thought the crudeness of the show.)

Berle arrived on television in 1948, almost by chance. He had heard that the Texaco people were looking for a master of ceremonies for a television version of
Texaco Star Theatre.
Berle knew instinctively that television was right for him. Texaco tried out several hosts, but it was obvious that Berle was the most successful. At the time he started, there were only 500,000 television sets in America. Almost from the start, his Tuesday night show on NBC was an
event.
The early history of television and the story of Berle’s show were close to being one and the same thing. Those who didn’t have television sets visited those who did. The very success of Berle’s show accelerated the sale of television sets; those Americans who did not yet own sets would return home after watching him at their neighbors’ houses and decide that, yes, it was finally time to take the plunge.

A year into the show, his fame was so great that his face was on the cover of both
Time
and
Newsweek
in the same week. He was television’s first superstar. He was forty-two in 1950, but his entire life had been spent in the theater. At the age of six he won a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest wearing his father’s clothes and shoes and a mustache cut from his mother’s furs. At the time his mother was a department-store detective, but she soon found her real calling: a stage mother. Alternately guarding her son and ruthlessly pushing him forward, she would roar with laughter if the audience seemed a
bit slow. Before he was ten he was on the vaudeville circuit; at twelve he was in a hit show called
Floradora
and was paid forty-five dollars a week. From then on, he always seemed to find work. He would do anything to make people laugh; it was his means of winning approval. Years later he would note with some sadness that his mother’s method was not necessarily the best for rearing a child: “You take a kid at the age of five, and make him the star of the family, and then take the same kid out into the world and make him a star with everyone catering to him as if he were more than another perishable human being, and it’s a miracle if that kid doesn’t grow up to be a man who believes he’s Casanova and Einstein and Jesus Christ all rolled into one.”

While still in his teens, he was opening the Palace, the best of the vaudeville houses, and by the time he was twenty-three, he was serving as master of ceremonies, a job he held for two years. As a star, he headlined at theaters around the country. He brought an almost demented energy to the job. He never allowed the pace to slacken. He would do anything for a laugh—don a wig, a dress, or false teeth, fall on his face or take a pie in it. There was never a pause in the action for the audience to catch its breath. He could not duplicate his success on the stage for radio. He tried several radio shows of his own, but they all flopped. He needed the audience right there with him. Whereas Allen’s humor was cerebral, satirizing the world around him, Berle’s work was about himself. He needed the audience to see him—what you saw was what you got.

In the late fall of 1948, his television show enjoyed a 94.7 rating, which meant that of all the sets in the country being used, 94.7 percent were tuned to his show. In the beginning NBC had lost money on its television shows, but by 1950 the tide turned: Sales for broadcast time tripled. In 1952 the industry made a profit of $41 million.

At this earliest stage of its history, television was primarily an urban phenomenon. According to
Variety,
of the 1,082,100 television sets operating in American homes in 1949, some 450,000 were in New York City and most of the remaining ones were in Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Berle was a classic Borscht Belt comedian. His live audience was primarily Jewish and urban; therefore, he was playing to what might be considered a home crowd. Five million people watched him every night and 35 percent of them lived in New York.