Uncle Jack

This old man comes out on 'the stage in blue--blue suit, blue shirt, blue tie, blue handkerchief. But nothing else is blue. Everyone knows his true colors come in 14-corned gold, a spray of white lies and a streak of pale green envy. Abuse turns him purple, but he never bursts into flame. When he asks politely for his violin, for example, it is tossed in a high parabola from the wings and smashes at his feet. He turns to the audience and draws every living soul to his side with the glazed-over helpless look that was once said to resemble "a calf that had just been struck between the eyes with a sledgehammer."

The calf, being 69 years old, is now a sacred cow. Jack Benny has returned to Broadway for the first time since he left Earl Carroll's Vanities in 1931 and went into radio. There he stood last week--in the redecorated, reopened, reclaimed-from-television, traditionalistic Ziegfeld Theater--telling the same jokes that he has been reworking for 30 years. Self-mitigation stories, each successive one is as fresh and original as an ocean wave; but the individual jokes are unimportant in themselves--it is their cumulative effect that has created this wonderful character that almost everyone would like for an uncle.

In his monologues, he told the audience that they might be a little tired of him, but the Prudential Life Insurance Co. is "thrilled" that he's still on the boards. He doesn't really need his glasses, he said vainly, except for the hearing aids in the rims. Crowing about his musical skill, he said he was "the Van Gogh of the concert circuit," or, as one fan had put it, "He's lost his ear."

Some Support. Did this dreadful stuff touch off a sound of laughter like hail on a tin roof? No. Jack Benny almost never does. His material is gauged for longevity rather than flash. His patent for permanence is simply that he can do no wrong. His cheapskate, self-deceiving, inept, shrug-it-off, endearing and vainglorious public character has grown round him for decade after decade like layer after layer of cement, and he has long since become utterly indestructible. Many of his peer contemporaries--Eddie Cantor. Fred Allen, Ben Bernie--are either retired or dead; but Benny just keeps on standing there with that look, and warm, unraucous laughter ripples all over the room.

He has support. It is a vaudeville show, really, started off by a couple of sensational jugglers and featuring a wildly improbable first act finale: a rousing fest of gospel song by the Clara Ward Singers. Nightclub Singer Jane Morgan, tall, strong, blonde, cute-cute, and amply chestiferous, sings well with sex in her throat, and allows Benny to kiss her as if he were Robert Goulet (in mid-embrace, he notices her ring, whips out a jeweler's glass and studies her diamond).

Constant Fiddling. But the show is Jack Benny all the way --a distance that can be measured only by the degree of built-in admiration that each member of the audience brings into the theater. Benny himself is a natively humorless man. and perhaps because of this he has developed a spread of technical skills. He can take a line, see eight ways to deliver it. and pick the one that will best serve his double purpose: to get an immediate laugh and also to deposit a bit of Benny characterization into the listeners' minds in order to draw interest for fu ture Benny lines, later in the show, later in the season, perhaps later in the 1960s and '70s. After a laugh line, Benny always has the next line. Thus he is the timer who decides when to let the audience tumble on and when to cut them off.

The best and most engaging number in his show is a violin duet in which he plays Getting to Know You with a pig-tailed hoyden named Toni Marcus. His violin is more to him than a tool for saving symphony orchestras, although in the past seven years he has earned more than $3,000,000 for various symphonies by appearing as mock-serious soloist at benefit concerts. He plays the fiddle every day at home and says it helps him when he is in a morose mood.

Unnoticed Guest. Lonely, forlorn, often sour, Jack Benny doesn't see the world as a great big ball of laughs. There is much color in his work but little in his private life. He has prosaic tastes and few pleasures (golf is one). He is intelligent but unsophisticated about nearly everything but show business. His education stopped in the ninth grade. He means it when he says that the highest moment of his career came when his home town in Illinois named a junior high school after him.

He goes Rolls-Roycing, alone. Those who know him generally agree that he is a somewhat unnoticed guest in his own home, which is run by his wife, Mary Livingstone, long a performer herself on his radio show and now the critic to whom he often turns for judgment of his TV shows. Their daughter Joan, twice divorced, lives near her parents in Beverly Hills. Jack often goes to visit his two grandchildren, alone.

Reversed Numerology. He hero-worships George Burns and will fall down on the floor and vibrate like a concrete-mixer when Burns--or for that matter, any other comedian--cracks a joke. Danny Kaye once insisted that he would rather play Benny's living room than any theater on earth. Equally loyal to his TV staff, Benny hasn't hired a new writer for 14 years; he freely acknowledges his large debt to them, and when Fred Allen was once out-talking him in an ad-lib joust, he said testily that if only his writers were with him he could make Allen look silly.

He glooms that it costs him plenty to be cheap, since he feels he has to tip extra because of it. He says he gives his caddies $5 tips for nine holes, cabbies $1.50 for a 60-c- ride, and waitresses 25% of the check. "I'm not as rich," he pleads, "as everybody thinks I am."

How much money he has is anybody's guess, and how much he can potentially make is a figure that still seems limitless. His new Broadway show is called Life Begins at 39. He will probably be back to do another one when he is 93.

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