The World's Worst Juggler

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Ten minutes before broadcast time, the famous comedian pushed his way through the stage curtain and raked the studio audience with a cold, poached eye.

They howled and they screamed. The comedian gave them a look of deep distaste and tongued his three-stick gum wad to the other side of his mouth. In the well-known nutmeg-grater tones, he announced: "For those of you who got caught in the crowd and swept in here--I would like to say that this is the Fred Allen show, and you still have eight minutes before we go on the air to get the heck out of here." They flailed helplessly in their seats.

"Geez," sighed the admiring sound-effects man, "whatta warmup!" The comedian had long since expressed his contempt for his own skill in that field: "Warming up a studio audience is like warming up dry ice. When you've done it, what have you got?"

By broadcast time the audience ("those hyenas") were weak with laughter. They were with him. They had been with him, all over the U.S., for 14 years. But never before this season has he had a greater volume of enthusiastic listeners. Twice this season, for the first time in Fred Allen's radio career, his show has ranked first in the Hooper telephone poll of listeners.

"If I Had the Brains." Fred's durability as a comedian has not depended solely on the obvious externals of slapstick. His voice, to be sure, sounds as if it might be filing his teeth down as it issues from his spigot mouth. And his face ("the sharpest knife," says Ludwig Bemelmans, "I have ever seen") is rather like a very large red pear that the ants have been at. Fred Allen has other gifts as well. John Steinbeck considers him "unquestionably the best humorist of our time ... a brilliant critic of manners and morals." Jack Benny, his private friend and public enemy, calls him "the best wit, the best extemporaneous comedian I know." Edgar Bergen, a very thoughtful fellow among professional comics, dogmatically says that Fred is "the greatest living comedian . . . a wise materialist who exposes and ridicules the pretensions of his times."

To Fred, these eulogies sound like a good definition of what he is not--and wishes most ardently that he could be. Once, when asked his supreme ambition, he replied simply: "Write, if I had the brains." Allen's output of writing during the last 14 years has been bulky, at least. "I am probably the only man," he says, "who has written more than he can lift."

Black Hole. As a writer of fiercely topical satire for a windblown medium, Allen has acquired, in spite of his protests, considerable stature. His work has an angry, big-city clank, a splashy neon idiom and a sort of 16-cylinder poetry. Like a well-barbered, satiric Buddha, he squats in his forest of steel-&-concrete trees, grinning them such a grin as they have seldom had to bear. It is certainly a grin as wide as Shaw's, if less thoughtful--and quite as bitter as Swift's, if less profound.

Yet Allen persistently regards himself as "just a man who can write good comedy lines." This certainty about his limitations descends, like a black hole, to the bottom of his brain. It allows the very basis of his thinking a cold, immediate access to the facts of living. Certainly few entertainers are so comfortlessly close to reality as Allen; still fewer are crowded so hard by sanity. Often his wit appears to be a cushion against hard fact. More often it seems an act of reprisal. He hurls it, rich with cyanic rancors, in the face of sham wherever he sees it. Of a male celebrity who strode into church one midwinter morning wearing sun glasses, Allen grated: "He's afraid God might recognize him and ask him for an autograph." Of a snob-noxious Hollywood character traveling with his "secretary," he murmured acidly: "He's traveling `a la tart."

With people who "take up his time," Fred is ruthlessly rude. When TIME asked for an interview, he snorted: "Why? You just have to find someone for your cover every week. . . . Well, it's the same trouble we have with guest stars. I'll cooperate--if it suits my convenience." Recently, when the U.S. Treasury asked him to appear at a bond rally, he declined: "Why should I? I pay my taxes."

Reluctantly Amiable. Only in the fastnesses of his pleasant, unpretentious Manhattan apartment, where he lives with his wife Portland (the Portland Hoffa of his radio show), does Allen lower his always-loaded guns. Even then, he does not often relax. Five days a week, 14 hours a day, he squints through nine newspapers and bends over his typewriter like a jeweler, chipping and polishing at the hard little brilliants for his program. Most nights he sleeps only six hours (with ear plugs).

Allen employs four assistant writers, but he does three-quarters of the show himself. He takes their drafts and rewrites them completely--between the lines. Groused one writer: "The only reason he hired us was because he likes to work on dirty paper." Gripes Allen: "Most writers just jump from cliche to cliche." He himself is so afraid of cliches that he even shies from saying "hello" to friends.

The Allens rarely gad about. One night a week they take in a movie. The other evenings, while Fred works, Portland reads or knits in bed--an old vaudeville custom. They rarely entertain. Allen's best friends are "just plain people"--barbers, shoeshine boys, paper boys, waiters, delicatessen storekeepers. With them, says Comic Henry Morgan, he is "a reluctantly amiable guy." From them, he collects an authentic U.S. idiom.

Myrrh Was Twit's. Allen comes honestly by the common touch. He was born John Florence Sullivan, 52 years ago, on the lace-curtain-Irish fringe of Cambridge, Mass. His father was a bookbinder. His mother died when he was three, and he and his brother Bobby went to live with her sister,"Aunt Lizzie" Herlihy, in Allston, Mass. He was a scrawny kid, all arms, legs and adenoids. The tough little Micks in his new neighborhood took one look at his pinched, birdlike face, nicknamed him "Twit," and let him play alone. To pass time -- and attract attention -- Johnny started juggling whatever came to hand. "That," says Fred, "was my first and biggest mistake." At six, he had performed his way into St. Anthony's choir, rose to be a Wise Man in the Christmas play. His first stage lines: "Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume breathes a life of gathering gloom." Every week after school, Fred went to Keith's to see the new show and pick up jokes and routines. He even began making up a few of his own. An early Allen (from algebra class): "Let X equal my father's signature."

One day Fred's father, "a kind of homemade wit," had a little joke of his own. As a 14th-birthday present for Fred, he marched him down to the Boston Public Library, put him to work three hours a night as a stack boy--at 20-c- an hour.

There was considerable doubt among Fred's superiors that he was worth the money. He spent most of his time with an inkwell on his chin, a pencil on his nose, and four or five books flying from hand to hand. When not so occupied, he would shatter the institution's leathern hush by bawling: "Say, did you hear about the man who dreamed he was eating Shredded Wheat and woke up to find the mattress half gone? HAW! HAW! HAW!"

Flea-Bag Years. When the library staff put on a show, Fred was ready. He had rounded up all his jokes and jugglery into an act. "I was a smash," Fred recalls. "They all told me I ought to be on the stage. The bastards. I believed them." At 17, he broke into Sam Cohen's Amateur Night circuit--50-c- a night. One night a noisy M.C. heckled him: "Where did you learn to juggle?" Allen tried his first onstage ad lib: "I took a correspondence course in baggage-smashing." Soon he got a chance to fill in for a professional juggler--at $2 a night. He took his first stage name: "Paul' Huckle--European Entertainer."

It wasn't long before Fred started thinking: "What the hell's a juggler? A pair of hands. And you never get anywhere working with your hands." Since people insisted on laughing at him, why not be a comic and get somewhere--maybe even as high as the Keith circuit? Fred changed his billing to "Freddie James --The World's Worst Juggler," and headed for New York. The next year was a time of flea bags, dime dinners and very little work. After that, he traveled--and gained comic breadth. On a tour of Australia he developed a riotous "vent" (ventriloquial) act and a trunkful of stage tricks "to get laughs without doing anything."

When the U.S. declared war, Fred came home, joined the Army, entertained in camps. After the war he took the name of an actors' agent, broke into the Keith circuit as Fred Allen, touring with the likes of Sophie Tucker, Eva Tanguay, Rooney & Bent. His act began on a dark stage with a spotlight on a placard, reading: "Mr. Allen Is Quite Deaf. If You Care to Applaud, Please Do So Loudly." His suit, he confided to the audience, had been made in Jersey City--"I'm a bigger man there than I am here."

The Shuberts brought Allen to Broadway in The Passing Show of 1922. From then until 1928, Fred was never out of a Broadway show. But for all those years, convinced that the little juggler from Boston would never last in the big time, he never even unpacked his trunk. In 1928, feeling more secure, he married Portland, a chorine in George White's Scandals. In the next three years he had his biggest Broadway hits, The Little Show and Three's a Crowd. But in 1932, he found himself without a booking. Why not fool around with that new thing, radio, for a couple of months?

"Get the Flat Voice!" Before he even got on the air, the couple of months became seven. When he did, it was by a flounder. An unwary adman, carrying an Allen audition record to the president of a corn products company, took the costly economy of going by Manhattan subway. On the way. the portable record-player got banged up. All the sponsor could hear was Allen's rasp. "Get me that man with the flat voice!" he ordered.

In the next three years Allen had three shows. It was in 1935, with Town Hall Tonight, that Fred really got on the radio beam. Not long after, he latched on to the biggest stunt of his career: his feud with Jack Benny. One night he assured a guest on his program, a twelve-year-old violinist, that he played the Flight of the Bumble Bee better than Benny played it after 40 years of practicing. Showman Benny knew a cue when he heard one. For ten years radio's biggest running gag has been kept alive without a single backstage strategy conference.

But Benny, never too glib with an ad lib, has seldom had the last word. Fred is the deadliest remarksman in show business. Once Jack twitted Fred about some fictitious "signs they hold up on your program telling people when to laugh. We don't have them on our show." Fred retorted: "You must remember, Jack, we're dealing with a class of people who can read."

Beyond the Moon. In 1943, Fred began to get dizzy spells. Diagnosis: hypertension. He got orders to quit radio. While he was resting, he took his third trip to the other side of the moon (Hollywood), made the third of his four pictures (Thanks a Million, Sally, Irene and Mary, Love Thy Neighbor, It's in the Bag), and a few observations: "California is a wonderful place to live--if you're an orange"; "Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars"; "An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer."

A year later, now healthy but a mild hypochondriac, he came back to the air, began his present half-hour show. Its main attractions: a ten-minute sketch involving a guest star and a short stroll down the most famed of all airlanes: Allen's Alley.

The Alley is a fairly serious attempt to take four large U.S. social groups, personify them--and play them for laughs. In other hands this idea has produced, at best, good caricatures. Allen has built it into at least two larger-than-life characters and a wealth of thoughtful jests. Each Sunday (8:30 p.m., E.S.T., NBC), as he wanders through the Alley, Allen visits:

P:Senator Beauregard Claghorn (Kenny Delmar), a julep-slupping burlesque of a Southern politico, a latter-day Civil Warrior with a mouth as big as the Mississippi's and a brain the size of a hominy grit. The Senator's development has been arrested in an artistic sense, too. After only six minutes on the air (four programs), his "That's a joke, son!" and "That is" were national bywords. Allen, who intended the Senator to have a far larger comic vocabulary, has been forced to give the public what it wants: plenty of nothing.

P:Titus Moody (Parker Fennelly) is a whey-voiced, ding-this-and-dang-that farmer with a wit hot off the general-store stove. Is his wife happy? "I don't pry into her business none." Titus' farm is "somethin' like Communism. Nobody's got nothin', but everybody's workin'." Does he like the radio? "I don't hold with furniture that talks." Titus is anemic. If cut, he will not bleed; the wound will only "hiss and pucker." Says Allen: "Titus will be getting better when the other characters have dried up and blown away."

P:Mrs. Pansy Nussbaum (Minerva Pious) is a triumph of comic virtuosity. To avoid offense to Pansy's prototype (the big-city Yiddish tenement dweller), Allen confines himself to kidding Yiddish-English. He seems endlessly aware of new and whimsical wrinkles in the dialect. "When I am a young goil, footloose and fancy," Pansy once related, "I am woiking, a waitress, in Doberman's delicatessen. Is coming every day for lunch a liverwurst salesman. He is a goodtime Irving, a fancy dandy, also floiting a bissel. The liverwurst salesman is to the other waitress, Supreme Feitelbaum, engaged. With ogling, also babytalk, I am stealing him away. For 20 years already he is mine husband Pierre. Crime does not pay!" Pierre, who now is never seen (or heard) in the Alley, is a luckless "schmo" who plays the ponies at "Epstein Downs" and "Hia-Levy." He is so unlucky that "if it is raining borsch outside, Pierre will be standing with a fork. He will also missing the potato."

P:Ajax Cassidy (Peter Donald) is a tuberculous, growler-rushing, clay-pipe Irishman who thinks he is "not long for this worrld." He is also the newest and least-developed of Fred's characters, but as Donald reads the role, it contains some winning bits of brannigan. A favorite Cassidy wheeze: having resolved to give up the stuff, he puts himself to the test by trying to pass Kerrigan's Kosy Korner without dropping in. After a desperate struggle he makes it--and promptly returns to Kerrigan's to celebrate his moral victory with a snootful.

Butterfly's Belch. At every step down the Alley, Fred has to fight the network censors. About these hapless blue-pencilers play the full, fanged lightnings of his wit. "The Molehill Men," he calls them. "A radio censor is a man who comes into his office every morning and finds a molehill on his desk. His job is to build that molehill into a mountain before he goes home." It still gets his sinus in an uproar to recall that during the war he was forbidden to refer slightingly to the Ubangi --because, the censors explained, the Ubangi might be holding captive some U.S. airmen, and take offense.

"If radio ever gets a Pulitzer Prize," he once said, "it will be pinned to the censor's wastebasket."

After boiling up over radio's censors, Fred's cup of wrath floods the entire industry. "The scales have not been invented," he says, "fine enough to weigh the grain of sincerity in radio." And, "Everything in radio is as valuable as a butterfly's belch." Network vice presidents are his favorite dish. They are "a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference." Their conferences are "meetings of men who singly can do nothing, but collectively agree that nothing can be done."

At the mention of Allen's name, most network executives get a drawn look about the eyes; but over conferential desks, they gleefully repeat this one: "Allen doesn't dislike radio. He just resents having to work all week long for only $20,000." He does indeed, as he once ruefully admitted in seven words that catalogue his complete attitude toward his work: "This drudgery, this sham, this gold mine." Actually, after the tax collectors and the 60 members of his cast are paid off, Allen's gold mine yields him closer to $2,000 a week.

A Shrinkage of Values. Allen does not spare his fellow comics. "Midgets," he calls them, "living on borrowed minds." This attitude has precluded for Allen hundreds of friendships. His only real intimates are two rusty old iron men of vaudeville, "Uncle Jim" Harkins and "Doc" Rockwell. Uncle Jim acts as his social secretary and general Man Friday; Doc has retired to Southport, Maine, where he tends lobster pots.

But Fred is a panhandler's dreamboat. For ten years an old vaudevillian named Wilbur used to rap at the door of the Allen apartment every Sunday afternoon. Every time, Fred lectured him sternly, finally gave him $10 "for the last time." Portland once caught Wilbur before he knocked, told him Fred was out of town. Fred waited, got more & more restless. When he had worked himself into a nervous lather, Portland relented, confessed. Next Sunday Fred lectured Wilbur twice as hard, gave him $20.

Touch artists are not the only ones to see the color of Allen's dough. He refuses to talk about his charities, but close friends estimate that they cost him at least $500 a week. Fred says only: "I was poor once myself." Except when absolutely necessary, he gives no thought to money. He saves his thinking for his work.

"I can't bat out 40 pages of literature every week," he says, "but I can usually turn out a good show. Men like Thurber, say, and E. B. White," he continues slowly, "I can't hope to catch them now. They spent the last 30 years becoming fine artists. I spent them another way. Ever since the job in the library, I've had to think of money first. Well, it doesn't matter any more. I guess I'm doing what I want to do. That's all I've ever done. Through changes in the world -- a shrinkage of values--I've become successful. Unless I get sick I can go along this way for a long time. And eventually, I have high hopes, I'll be able to withdraw from the human race."

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