Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  NEW YORK,

  April 28, 1980

  GLEASON

  Here he comes, “the Great One,” in a maroon stretch limousine, its planes and curves glistening in the summer sun. The limousine moves in a stately way down a curving path and stops in front of a huge pile of stone, brick, and mortar that is the centerpiece of the Riverdale estate known as Wave Hill. The Great One steps out of the limousine, blinks in the bright sunshine, glances at the cables, massed trailers, busy extras, grips, and electricians who are part of every movie location. Then he steps into the huge Beaver 36 mobile home that is parked on the shoulder of the driveway.

  “Come on in,” Jackie Gleason calls behind him. “Have a seat, I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  He’s 69, and looks in good shape, given what he has done to the body over the years: the gorging and the pig-outs, the monumental drinking bouts, a broken arm in the forties, a broken leg in the fifties, the crash diets, careening horseplay, billions of cigarettes. He’s six feet tall, and large, but he doesn’t look fat. He goes to the back of the trailer with a valet, closes the door, and emerges in a black shirt and slacks. The face is now a draftsman’s delight: pouches, slashes, the large upper lip sliced by a thin mustache, eyes that alternately sparkle and grieve, a face made for expression. He lights a cigarette, sits back on a couch.

  A production assistant leans in through the open door. “Can I get you anything, Mr. Gleason?”

  “Yeah,” he says, “a couple of broads.”

  Everybody laughs except Gleason. He blinks in a deadpan way and takes a drag on a cigarette.

  Suddenly, it’s Gleason time again. The so-called lost episodes of The Honeymooners are appearing three nights a week on Showtime; they will go on for a year before joining the classic 39 pieces from 1955-56 already in syndication. Gleason is serving as creative consultant and co-producer of a Broadway musical based on The Honeymooners. Membership in R.A.L.P.H. (Royal Association for the Longevity and Preservation of The Honeymooners) is soaring as more and more young people discover the great comedies made 30 years ago by Gleason, Art Carney, Audrey Meadows, and Joyce Randolph within a 2o-by-3o-foot set in the Adelphi Theatre on West 54th Street. When four “lost” episodes of The Honeymooners were shown at the Museum of Broadcasting last year, the place was jammed with old fans and new.

  “Who couldn’t be happy about it?” Gleason says. “To think that something you did 30 years ago can still give people laughs: I mean, that’s somethin’!”

  But the Gleason surge is more than a nostalgia act; he’s working harder than he has in years. To begin with, there is the TV movie that brought him to Riverdale on this bright summer day. Producer Robert Halmi managed to bring Gleason together with Art Carney for the first time since 1978 in the only non-Honeymooners work they’ve done since the early fifties. The movie, to be on CBS September 23, is called Izzy and Moe; it’s about two failed vaudevillians (Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith) who became Prohibition agents in the 1920s and provided grand tabloid entertainment for the duration of the Volstead Act. Gleason worked hard with writer Robert Boris to remove any possible echoes of The Honeymooners from the script.

  “We didn’t want to do Ralph and Norton again,” Gleason says. “And this is nothing like them. These are two different guys altogether.”

  For Izzy and Moe, Gleason is supervising the music, most of it in a Dixieland style (he’s composed three tunes). After that, he will head out to Hollywood to work with Tom Hanks in a feature film called Nothing in Common.

  “Yeah, I’m working,” Gleason says, and then waves the cigarette. “But what the hell, I always worked.”

  But there is more to this latest Gleason moment than career notes; there’s a growing awareness that Gleason has been for many years one of this country’s great comic geniuses, on a level, perhaps, with Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, and Chaplin. This doesn’t apply to his acting in the Smokey and the Bandit movies (although even that work has its own solidity and sense of surprise), or to the straight acting he did in such films as The Hustler (for which he received an Academy Award nomination in 1962), Requiem for a Heavyweight, or the much acclaimed TV version of The Time of Your Life. Gleason deserves the half-mocking title the Great One for his accomplishments on his own television shows — that is, for the work he created or controlled.

  “Jackie Gleason is an artist of the first rank,” John O’Hara wrote years ago, with uncharacteristic generosity. “An artist puts his own personal stamp on all of his mature work, making his handling of his material uniquely his own. Millions of people who don’t give a damn about art have been quick to recognize a creation. Ralph Kramden is a character that we might be getting from Mr. Dickens if he were writing for TV.”

  That gets close to the heart of Gleason’s enduring accomplishment. He was a creator of a vast Dickensian cast of characters: Reginald Van Gleason III, the Poor Soul, Joe the Bartender, Charlie “the Loudmouth” Bratton, Rudy the Repairman, Crazy Guggenheim, Stanley R. Sogg (the late-show pitchman who sold, among other things, a book called How to Slide Downhill on Your Little Brother).

  And then, of course, there were Ralph and Alice, Norton and Trixie. I first saw them while I was a teenager in Brooklyn in the fifties, sitting in Catherine Rogan’s living room. I laughed at them then and laugh at them now. “This was nudge comedy,” Gleason says. “When you see Ralph or Ed, or any of the others, you nudge the guy next to you and say, ’Jeez> that’s just like Uncle Charlie,’ or some guy down the block.”

  True, but there was more to the show than that. When Gleason first exploded on TV all those years ago, he wasn’t just a gifted comedian. He was ours. He wasn’t just New York; he was Brooklyn. When he swaggered onstage to open the show, flanked by gorgeous women, we swaggered with him; when we read about his all-night sessions at Toots Shor’s or Eddie Condon’s, his gigantic meals, his partying with show girls and prizefighters and Max Kaminsky’s band, we ate and drank and parried with him; when we picked up the News and Mirror in 1954 and read about his $n-million deal with CBS, it was as if we’d signed the deal, too.

  So, in Brooklyn in the fifties, we watched The Honeymooners in a broader context; it was the continuing story of Ralph and Alice, Norton and Trixie, but it was also part of the Gleason legend. We didn’t imagine in those days that The Honeymooners would be with us the rest of our lives. And yet here they are, six nights a week, as constant as the stars (each of the 39 episodes has been played more than 200 times in the New York area). Some of us left Brooklyn, others stayed; we made our lives; but Ralph and Norton remain the same, and we know them better now than we did then.

  “I guess it lasted for a couple of reasons,” Gleason says. “One, the show was funny. That usually helps. Two, you like the people. If the audience likes you, you’re home free.”

  The show was also a triumph of show-business craft. Gleason, with his producer, Jack Philbin, and his crew of writers (Walter Stone, Marvin Marx, Herbert Finn, and others), evolved rules for The Honeymooners that contributed to the show’s durability. “First, it had to be believable,” Gleason says. “Whatever the deal was, you had to believe it could happen. Second, the audience had to know what’s really going on before Ralph does. That was the key to the comedy.”

  In addition, each show was classically constructed, with a beginning, middle, and end (“I see stuff now that stops, but doesn’t really end”). The situations were quickly, carefully, and lucidly set up, the characters were clearly defined, and the relationships were held together by a rough kind of love. Ralph really did believe that Alice was the greatest (he would never ever really try to send her to the moon with a haymaker). Alice loved Ralph in the most confident way, unafraid to slam into him, completely aware of his flaws and faults, his insecurities, his boastfulness, his wild-eyed schemes, but equally clear about his strengths, the most important of which was a heart as big as Bensonhurst. They had no kids (except Ralph), a fact that made the relationship more modern than those in most of the kid-littered
sitcoms that first showed up in the fifties. And, of course, Ralph and Norton loved each other, too, without ever stating what they felt. They were as dependent upon each other as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whom Ralph, the dreamer, and Norton, the practical man, resemble in other ways.

  In his 1956 biography of Gleason, The Golden Ham, Jim Bishop reconstructed the story conference that led to the invention of The Honeymooners:

  One afternoon Joe Bigelow and Harry Crane were trying to write a sketch with the star, and Gleason said that he had an idea for a sketch that would revolve around a married couple — a quiet shrewd wife and a loudmouthed husband.

  “You got a title for it?” asked Bigelow.

  “Wait a minute,” said Crane. “How about The Beast’?”

  Jackie got to his feet. “Just a second,” he said. “I always wanted to do this thing, and the man isn’t a beast. The guy really loves this broad. They fight, sure. But they always end in a clinch.”

  Bigelow shrugged. “It could be a thing.”

  “I come from a neighborhood full of that stuff. By the time I was fifteen, I knew every insult in the book.”

  “Then let’s try it,” said Bigelow.

  “But not The Beast,’ “ said Jackie. “That’s not the title.”

  “Why not?”

  “It sounds like the husband is doing all the fighting. We need something a little left-handed as a title. You know, this kind of thing can go and go and go.”

  “How about The Lovers,’ “ said Harry Crane.

  “That’s a little closer, Harry.” Gleason paced the floor. “A little closer, but it could mean that they’re not married. We need something that tells at once that they’re married.”

  ” The Couple Next Door’?”

  “No. How about The Honeymooners’?”

  That was it, and, like a great novelist, Gleason reached back into the early years of his life for his characters. They’re still with us; they’re still with Gleason.

  “I knew a lot of guys like Ralph,” he says now, “back there, growing up.”

  In William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Comic Writers, written in the winter of 1818, there’s a line that’s true of all of us but seems particularly appropriate to Gleason: “To understand or define the ludicrous, we must first know what the serious is.” The serious roots of Gleason’s talent go back to the Brooklyn of his childhood, specifically to Bushwick, which was then an Irish and Italian working-class district.

  “Everything happened there,” Gleason says. “Everything.”

  He was born Herbert John Gleason on February 26, 1916, the second child of Herbert Gleason and Mae Kelly. There was a brother eleven years older than Jackie; his name was Clemence, and he died when Jackie was three. Though Jackie has no memory of him, he took his dead brother’s name at confirmation. His father, slim, black-haired, a drinker, worked in the Death Claims Department of the Mutual Life Insurance Company at 20 Nassau Street.

  “He had beautiful Spencerian handwriting,” Gleason remembers. “And he would fill in the policies with the names. I remember him sometimes doing the work at night at the kitchen table.”

  Herbert Gleason was paid $35 a week; he sold candy bars on the side. The family moved all around Bushwick, living on Herkimer Street and Somers Street, Bedford Avenue and Marion Street. But young Jackie stayed in the same school, P.S. 73. And he went to the same church, Our Lady of Lourdes. The Gleasons settled at last in the third-floor-right apartment at 358 Chauncey Street, the street where, many years later, Ralph and Alice, Norton and Trixie were to establish permanent residence.

  On Friday, December 15,1925, at ten minutes after noon, Herbert Gleason took his hat, his coat, and his paycheck, left the offices of the insurance company, and was never seen again. The night before, he had destroyed all the family pictures in which he appeared. When Mae Gleason realized that he was not coming back, she took a job as a change clerk in the Lorimer Street station of the BMT. And Jackie started his education on the streets. He was a member of a gang called the Nomads, hung around Schuman’s candy store and Freitag’s Delicatessen’s (as it was pronounced). He went dancing at the Arcadia when he had money, and he learned to shoot pool. About his father, years later, Gleason said, “He was as good a father as I’ve ever known.” But his father did leave him with something: a vision.

  “My father took me to the Halsey Theatre, a real dump, a classic,” he says. The Halsey featured a daily movie and five acts of vaudeville. “We sat way down front, in the first row. I’d never seen this before, guys coming out and saying funny things, getting laughs. And for some reason, at some point, I stood up and looked out over the audience. That was the moment. I knew I wanted to be like that, facing an audience, the audience facing me. I knew I wanted to do that.”

  It was a while before he faced an audience again. After his father left, Jackie started hanging out in Joe Corso’s Poolroom One Flight Up (“That was the whole name”). He went there with his friend Carmine Pucci, and when they won at pool, they’d buy cheap wine or “loosies” (individual cigarettes). “I was a rack boy when I was ten, and hustling guys already. Graduation day was always the best. On graduation day, everybody’d get these gold pins. And I’d play them for their gold pins. Then I’d take the pins to the hockshop and get maybe $20, and nobody ever asked what a ten-year-old kid was doing with all these gold pins.”

  When he graduated from P.S. 73, he talked himself into the school play, doing a recital of “Little Red Riding Hood” in a Yiddish accent that tore up the place, and then went on to John Adams High School, supposedly for “vocational training.” He never finished the first year, and moved on to his true school: the streets.

  “For a while, I worked as an exhibition diver for a guy named Chester Billy: He was the star and the rest of us did all the funny stuff. We had this portable tank that was six feet deep. They greased the bottom so when you dove in you slid right up. The bottom was terrible, disgusting; it stunk of grease. They would fold up the tank after the show with the grease still in it. And all the girls in the show had green hair from the chlorine.

  “Anyway, we ended up in Bangor, in some kind of an armory. And Billy was supposed to dive into the tank from some girders. About 90 feet. But this day he was sick — he got loaded the night before or something — and he said to me, ‘You do it.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ He said, ‘You do it, or you’re fired.’ So I climbed up in the girders and looked down, and said, ‘What the hell,’ and dove. Obviously, I lived. But when I pulled myself up on the side of that greasy tank, I said to myself, ‘That’s it, I quit.’ And I did.”

  Still, it was show business. In Brooklyn, he went with his friends (and his first girlfriend, Julie Dennehy — pronounced Dunnahee, immortalized later by Joe the Bartender) to places called the Bijou, the Gem, the Diamond. “There was an outdoor theater, too, where they couldn’t start the picture until it was dark. I got the Poor Soul from the assistant manager in one of those places.” And finally he arrived at the Halsey again, where there was an amateur show on Wednesday nights “which was usually guys who played stomach pumps and things like that.”

  Gleason thought he could do as well as most of the contestants, probably better (“Vanity is an actor’s courage; if he doesn’t have that, he’s finished”). He worked up an act with a friend named Charlie Cretter, who had a soprano voice. Cretter dressed as a girl; Gleason told jokes.

  “All the guys from the Nomads, all the people from the neighborhood were all there, and when we came on, they started cheering and shouting. And we were a hit. I guess the guy that ran the Halsey realized we could sell tickets, so he offered me the master of ceremonies job. I took the place of a guy named Sammy Birch, who was a friend of mine. First prize was 50 cents, and second prize was a card that introduced you to the guy that booked the acts, the agent. I must’ve been a hit, because the guy from the Folly Theater, three stations away, he came and saw me and offered me a job at his theater too. So I worked Wednesday night at the Ha
lsey and Monday and Friday at the Folly. That was the beginning.”

  During this period, Gleason met a young dancer named Genevieve Halford; years later, he married her. But most of the time, he was going with Julie Dennehy. Sometimes he went to the Myrtle Burlesque, to watch the comics. He remembered seeing an act called Izzy Pickle and His Cucumbers. He was also a fan of Billy “Cheese and Crackers” Hagen. (“A beautiful broad would walk across the stage, and he’d say, ’Cheese and crackers.’ That’s as dirty as they got.”) Two of his friends were working as ushers at Loew’s Metropolitan in downtown Brooklyn, and they started writing down the jokes of visiting Manhattan comics for Gleason to use at the Halsey and the Folly. He hadn’t yet learned that he was a comedian, not a comic. (“I always like Ed Wynn’s distinction,’” Gleason says. “He said that a comic says funny things; a comedian does funny things.”) But every night, burlesque, vaudeville, saloon humor were working their way into the Gleason style.

  Then in April 1935, his mother died of erysipelas. She was just short of 50; Gleason was 19.

  “After the funeral, I had 36 cents to my name,” Gleason says. “And I was on the stoop, and Mr. Dennehy came along and said I could stay with them. I said, ‘No, I got 36 cents, I’m going to New York.’ So I went over there on the train. I bought an apple-butter waffle and some apple juice to eat. That left me about 11 cents. Then I ran into Sammy Birch, from the neighborhood, the guy who was before me at the Halsey. He was staying at the Hotel Markwell, and he let me sleep on the floor.”