Jack for Jackie

Chortled TV Comic Jackie Gleason last week: "I feel like a guy who never went to church very often who's suddenly been made a cardinal." Gleason's new eminence came as a double helping: his hour-long Saturday night show on CBS was newly rated No. 1 on three major research systems, and he was hitched to one of the biggest TV contracts in history.

The Buick Division of General Motors, currently sponsoring Milton Berle on NBC, announced that it had signed Gleason to a $7,000,000 contract to begin on CBS next season, with an option after two years for a third year at $4,000,000.* This fat deal, Gleason admits, was in the works for some time. In fact, NBC was in on the dickering, too. "All you gotta do," says Gleason, "is rub two networks together and you get a fire." When the figures were set. Jackie recalled: "First they said $6,000,000 and my mouth dropped open. They mistook it for reticence and upped it a million." The new contract calls for a half-hour filmed show featuring Gleason and his sidekicks. Art Carney, Audrey Meadows and Joyce Randolph, in The Honeymooners. This is an expanded version of a series of sketches running on his current program, which stars Jackie as Ralph Kramden, a frantic schemer who, unlike Jackie in real life, is always going nowhere in particular in a great hurry. Jackie Gleason Enterprises will retain ownership (for reruns) of the shows and will produce a weekly half-hour musical revue to precede The Honeymooners. To top off his already brimming cup. Gleason also gets a 15-year contract from CBS. paying $2,000 a week after the Buick show folds. This, he says, is an "exclusivity" deal aimed at keeping him off rival networks.

Gleason. 38, is a big (6 ft., 230 Ibs.), hard-working Brooklyn boy who started out in an amateur-night act in 1931. He gagged his way into nightclubs and theaters, later made out passably well in a few Broadway shows and movies. "I was," he says, "a fairly well-known bum." A dabbler of sorts, he has twice played serious roles on TV dramatic shows, conducts and writes music, although he cannot read notes ("I use numbers and arrows, then I call in an arranger and tell him what I want"). His newest hobby, psychic research, may prove profitable, for he is planning a TV show that will try to dramatize psychic phenomena. Having investigated several spiritual mediums already, Gleason reports sadly that "there are an awful lot of frauds in that business."

* Buick drops Berle at the close of this season, but Berle's spokesmen expect other sponsors to come scrambling for the honor of paying his TV bills. In any event, Berle has a 30-year contract with NBC.

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