Gus Edwards was the most successful producer of schoolroom acts. He was constantly auditioning children, and many reviled him as an exploiter of child labor. Comedian Joe Frisco used to have a line in his act, “Hide your children—here comes Gus Edwards.” Future comedy stars who started in schoolroom sketches included Larry Fine of the Three Stooges, Eddie (father of Teri) Garr, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel and the Marx Brothers.
The Marx Brothers toured as the Six Mascots, and like many schoolroom acts, their characters were defined using racial caricature. Such racial stereotypes were common in vaudeville. Jack Sobel, father of comedian and television director Howard Storm, was in a Gus Edwards road company. “It was called School Days with the Crazy Kids,” says Storm. “My father did what in those days they called ‘the Jew comic.’ They had the Irish comic, the Dutch comic, the Jew comic.”
Joe Laurie Jr. argued that in those days “nobody took exception to the billings of The Sport and the Jew, Irish by Name but Coons by Birth, The Mick and the Policeman, The Merry Wop, Two Funny Sauerkrauts. It was taken in good humor by the audience. There were no pressure groups and no third generation to feel ashamed of immigrant origins.”
Laurie Jr. said nobody found it offensive, but a better interpretation is that fewer found it offensive. Many felt uncomfortable with racial stereotypes, but there were few places for their grievance to be heard. Vaudeville comedians Harry Hershfield and Peter Donald made their livings with racial caricature. When former schoolroom players Groucho Marx and Walter Winchell, now a newspaper columnist, found themselves in a position of power years later, they waged a battle to have racial caricature erased from vaudeville. They used Hershfield and Donald as examples of undesirable comedy. Hershfield and Donald defended themselves, telling the press that racial caricature “if done well is not offensive.” In an open letter to Variety they argued, “The most dialectically used and abused nationals were the Scots and the Swedes—who have never complained.” Groucho Marx shot back angrily, “The Sandy McPhersons and Yonny Yohnsons were not a minority being subjected to oppression, restriction, segregation or persecution.”
Groucho’s perspective was informed by the racism the Marx Brothers had faced while playing the road. “We had to brazen our way into strange towns in the Midwest and down South,” said Harpo Marx, “where we knew we had three strikes against us. One: we were stage folks, in a class with gypsies and other vagrants. Two: we were Jewish. Three: we had New York accents.” Comedian Benny Rubin remembered vaudeville in the Deep South. “There were the hate towns, which you found down South where they hated Catholics, Blacks and Jews. So anybody like that didn’t have a chance.”
The protests against racial caricature made gains in the final years of vaudeville. Laurie Jr. wrote, “Gradually each burlesque Irishman, Jew, German and Italian gave way on the stage to the ‘neat’ comic—one well-dressed and attractive, who relied on his wit and talent for laughter and applause.”
One element that did not disappear until after the Second World War was blackface. Everyone from Fred Allen to W. C. Fields to Mae West spent early days smeared in burnt cork. More than any other racial bit, blackface persisted. It was less a matter of race prejudice than conformity. “Nearly all the singles [solo acts] started to do blackface,” said Laurie Jr. “But it wasn’t like the old-time minstrels who tried to portray a character; these new minstrels just put on black and talked white. No dialect, didn’t even try, in fact some of them told Hebe stories in blackface! For what reason they blacked up will never be known. It became a craze. People figured you were an actor when you had black on. And besides, working in white face demanded a personality, which many of the guys didn’t have.”
Bob Hope was a blackface comedian. He abandoned it only because he was late for a gig. “I missed the streetcar to this theater one night and I didn’t have time to put the blackface on. Mike Shea, who booked all the theaters, said, ‘Don’t ever put that stuff on your face anymore because your expressions after a joke are priceless.’”
Ted Healy, comic straight man and creator of the Three Stooges, started as a blackface comedian. He left an imprint on American comedy, influencing performers like Milton Berle. “He was one of my idols,” said Berle. “I loved his style. He was flippant. He was ad-lib. Threw one-liners. The audience talking back. He was the [Don] Rickles of his day.”
Ted Healy hired Moe Howard for an act called the Annette Kellerman Diving Girls. “There were six girls and we four boys,” said Howard. “We did a thirty-foot dive into a tank. We wore long bathing suits, the one-piece variety. We quit after a pretty young lady named Gladys Kelly misjudged the tank, broke her neck and was killed instantly.”
Ted Healy hired Moe Howard and his brother for a new act. “[Healy] found these three guys and he put them as his assistants,” said Berle. “That was the Three Stooges. He brought them out, he lined them up and—this visual bit—he would smack them all at one time.”
The cat was initially billed as Ted Healy and His Three Southern Gentlemen, and the assistants were Moe Howard, Shemp Howard and violin player Larry Fine. When first offered the gig, Larry Fine was beholden to his contract with producer Fred Mann and his Rainbow Gardens nightclub. “A few nights later, fate stepped in when the police closed the Rainbow Gardens for violation of the Prohibition laws,” said Moe Howard. “Not only was the Gardens shut down, but Fred Mann committed suicide. Now there was no contract problem and Larry was in the act.”
The New York Times captured Healy’s essence with a review by theater critic Brooks Atkinson: “Mr. Healy is one of those loud, rough, hustling fools who make the most satisfactory comedians. When he tackles a refractory close-harmony singer, murder burns in his eye. When he assaults from the rear, he kicks to kill. When he stuffs two eggs in a bumpkin’s mouth, he does not temper the artistic effort with gentleness. Sex does not abash this democratic buffoon; he tackles women around the neck quite as roughly as men. It is a refreshing thing to see. He is dangerous.” Healy’s onstage violence was an outgrowth of his brooding offstage demeanor. Moe Howard said, “While under the influence, he became a foul-mouthed vicious character.”
Healy was drunk the night he tried to kill comedian George Jessel. Jessel supposedly invented the Bloody Mary while trying to concoct a tomato-based hangover cure and named it after Healy’s girlfriend, Mary Brown Warburton. The next day Walter Winchell made mention of it in his column. Healy read it backstage at a Chicago vaudeville theater and flew into a rage. “Ted turned white,” said Jessel. “What the hell are you doing making a pass at my girl you son of a bitch! He pulled out a pistol and tried to shoot me. I ducked and the shot missed, but as the pistol went off within a foot of my right ear, I was completely deaf for a week.”
The Three Stooges started accepting film offers in the early 1930s. Tired of Healy’s erratic behavior, they moved on without him. When the Stooges found solo success, Healy filed a lawsuit that laid claim to all poking, slapping and nyuk nyuk nyuking. He lost the suit and tried a new act with replacement Stooges, but nothing worked as long as booze controlled him. “Ted was suffering from a bad case of the DT’s,” said Moe Howard. “We found Ted in his room, screaming. He insisted there were firemen coming through the walls of his room.”
Healy died in 1937, and his death became a Hollywood mystery: part reality, part urban legend. “It seems that Ted was at the Trocadero, the famous nightclub on the Sunset Strip,” said Howard. “Drinking up a storm, he got into an argument with three patrons. The men went outside and, before Ted had a chance to raise his fists, they jumped him, knocked him to the ground and kicked him in the ribs and stomach. Ted passed away a few days later of a brain concussion.”
MGM screenwriter Harry Rapf claimed it was actor Wallace Beery who bashed Healy, but the coroner was adamant that the cause of death was “chronic alcoholism.” Some said it was a cover-up. Healy’s ex-wife complained, “Police are not investigating the right people.” Curly Howa
rd, who five years earlier had replaced his older brother Shemp in the Stooges, said, “It can’t be on the level.” Healy wasn’t long for the world either way, but in creating the Three Stooges and influencing Milton Berle, he had a lasting effect on comedy.
Until the 1920s, most vaudeville shows were without a master of ceremonies. The idea of a host never crossed anyone’s mind. Placards with performers’ names were the only emcee necessary. San Francisco–born Frank Fay broke that tradition and became renowned as the first of the great comic emcees—and in many minds the first stand-up comedian. Journalist Abel Green witnessed the revolution and said, “Fay pioneered the emcee and made him important.”
Fay was a long-standing emcee at the crown jewel of American vaudeville theaters, the Palace. If you played the New York venue in the 1920s, it meant you had made it to the top. To succeed at the Palace was to be a star, the equivalent of a Las Vegas headliner in the 1960s. It was at that venue that Frank Fay not only became a bona fide celebrity, but developed the idea of an emcee. For several years vaudeville used only painted signs with the name of each act to announce who was coming to the stage. Fay changed this common practice, becoming one of the first people to actually emcee a show. His role as an introducer and extroducer was another revolutionary shift in stand-up. He wasn’t just introducing, but entertaining as he did so. If the previous act bombed, he warmed the crowd back up, and if the momentum was good, he just kept the show going.
Frank Fay didn’t care for physical shtick. He got his laughs by standing in one place and speaking. Strange as it seems now, this low-key convention was unheard of at the time. He stood and talked—no gimmicks. And he held comics who relied on gimmickry in contempt. He would address Bert Lahr, a comedian who utilized facial mugging and costumes: “Well, well, well, what’s the low comedian doing today?”
Fay had once participated in low comedy himself. Veteran comic Johnny Dyer goaded Fay into showbiz while regularly hustling him in billiards. Dyer wrote an act in which Fay wore baggy pants, roller skates and a fake nose, circling Dyer as he made wisecracks. The eight-minute performance ended with Fay’s pants tearing in half. It was a kind of humiliation Fay vowed never to repeat. Out of this embarrassment he blazed a new path as the first pure stand-up comedian.
He hit the circuit in 1917 as “Frank Fay, Nut Monologist,” and resistance was immediate. Variety critically stated, “Fay needs a good straight man, as before, to feed his eccentric comedy.” A comedian standing alone onstage? Unheard of. Doesn’t this guy know anything about showbiz? To stand still and tell jokes was a foreign move. To perform without some kind of gimmick was considered amateurish. “A comedian without a prop can’t click,” said actor Wesley Ruggles. “I learned that back in the days when I pushed the props around for Charlie Chaplin. Great pantomist that he is, Chaplin realizes the necessity of props.”
Fay succeeded without props and without a partner. He slicked back his hair and put on a well-tailored suit. His act grew stronger and, as people started to respond to his style, his ego ballooned. Other comedians sharing the bill became the targets of his condescending put-downs. Milton Berle once challenged Fay “to a battle of wits.” Fay replied, “I never attack an unarmed man.” Fay and Berle had one of comedy’s great rivalries. It wasn’t without reason. Comedy writer Milt Josefsberg said, “In a business known for its lack of bigotry, he [Fay] was a bigot. This was no secret, but widely known and well substantiated.” In a business known for its many Jewish comedians, the goyish Fay was vocally anti-Semitic.
Fay performed at the Palace one evening as Berle stood in the wings watching. Fay gestured to the stagehands and yelled, “Get that little Jew bastard out of the wings!” Berle fumed. “I had picked up a stage brace,” said Berle. “I reached out and spun him around. Before he knew what was happening, I hit him right across the face with the brace. It ripped his nose apart.”
Fay’s views were common knowledge in industry circles. “Everybody criticized Frank Fay because of the anti-Semitism,” says comedian Will Jordan. “Everyone was on Berle’s side, but in actual fact Fay was much better than Berle. When they went onstage Frank Fay would just cut him to pieces.”
Fay was so disliked by his fellow performers that jokes at his expense became famous. Fred Allen said, “The last time I saw Frank Fay he was walking down Lover’s Lane holding his own hand.” When Fay married movie star Barbara Stanwyck, the joke went:
“Who is the actor with the biggest prick in Hollywood?”
“Barbara Stanwyck.”
Despite his unlikable offstage demeanor, Fay turned into the most consistent stand-up comic of the late 1920s and essentially changed the art form. Crowds and critics eventually came to accept a man standing alone, cracking wise. No longer did Fay bill himself as a “Nut Monologist.” Now he used egomaniacal monikers like “The Great Fay,” “The King” and “Broadway’s Favorite Son.” One snide reporter wrote, “Fay forgot to mention who made the appointment.”
Those who could overlook his racism and narcissism held him in extraordinary regard. “Frank Fay was something else,” said Bob Hope. “He was just a sensational man that could do more with nothing, with attitude, than any man I ever saw on the stage.”
As influential as Fay was to stand-up, the Marx Brothers were to comedy as a whole. When they entered show business at the start of the century, vaudeville was already a family trade. Their mother, Minnie, was sibling to Al Shean, part of the famous comedy team Gallagher and Shean. So vast was the popularity of Gallagher and Shean that they spawned low-rent knockoffs, and the Keith circuit sent down the directive: “Only one Gallagher and Shean imitator allowed per show.”
Minnie Marx managed her sons, the well-remembered Groucho, Harpo and Chico and their less beloved brothers Zeppo and Gummo. Groucho remembered an early gig they did at the Henderson Music Hall on Coney Island. “That’s where Harpo appeared on stage for the first time. At the opening performance he shit his pants.”
The Marx Brothers crisscrossed North America for twenty-five years, sharing the bill with struggling unknowns like Jack Benny, W. C. Fields and Charles Chaplin. Groucho first saw Chaplin while killing time between performances in a small Canadian town. “It was a real dump. Chaplin was doing an act there called “A Night at the Club.” I never heard an audience laugh like he made that audience laugh. I went back to tell the boys about him. I told them, ‘I just saw the greatest comedian in the world. I don’t know who he is, but you have to meet him.’ We had to leave for the next town but we managed to get acquainted with him there. He was getting $25.00 a week and was dressing with five other guys in one room . . . Chaplin would wear a high neck shirt. He’d wear it for two weeks, then wash it and put it on again. He only had one shirt! . . . Five years later I went to California and he was living in a huge home and fucking all the leading ladies.”
Chico, Groucho, Gummo, Harpo and Zeppo received their stage names from monologist Art Fisher, who equated them with comic strip characters. “At that time there was a very popular comic strip called Knocko the Monk,” said Harpo. “As a result there was a rash of stage names that ended in ‘o.’ On every bill there would be at least one Bingo, Zingo, Socko, Jumpo or Bumpo.”
Future comedian Jack Benny was playing in the orchestra pit when they passed through Illinois. Minnie Marx asked him to join the Marx Brothers as their accompanist. “She was impressed by my playing and sight reading and offered me fifteen dollars a week plus transportation and room and board to travel with her young sons,” said Benny. But his mother felt he was too young and nixed the idea immediately. Benny was somewhat relieved to keep a distance. “We weren’t very close. In fact, I never knew whether I liked them or not. I was always a little afraid of them.”
Benny crossed paths with them later when he became a professional vaudeville comedian. He hated how they disrupted the balance of the bill. The Marx Brothers had a fast, manic act and it was hard for the methodically paced Ben
ny to compete. “Benny didn’t know what kind of a living hell he was headed for,” said Harpo Marx. “For thirty solid weeks he had to follow the Marx Brothers on the bill.” Benny said, “The thing was that nobody could follow the Marx Brothers.” W. C. Fields experienced the same nightmare. “Most of the time Fields would find himself playing to only half a house because a lot of people would leave after our act,” said Groucho. “One day Fields went to see the manager of the theater and told him he had to leave for New York. He said, ‘You see this hand? I can’t juggle anymore because I’ve got noxis on the conoxsis and I have to see a specialist right away.’ He just made up a word because he didn’t want to continue following our act.”
In 1924 the Marx Brothers took their vaudeville act to Broadway and opened in a legitimate show called I’ll Say She Is. It brought them to a new breed of audience and furthered their status. When they returned to vaudeville they feuded with Edward F. Albee over budgetary allotments. Albee, angered, fired them and pressured theater operators not to hire them. “We had kicked ourselves smack off the pinnacle of vaudeville,” said Harpo Marx. “Too late, we learned that Albee’s power ranged far beyond his own empire. When you were on his blacklist, doors were closed in your face all over town.”
The Marx Brothers were relegated to a B circuit and no longer encountered Jack Benny. Benny knew he wasn’t capable of the madcap pace of the Marxes and instead took cues from low-key, post-Fay monologists like Julius Tannen.
The Comedians Page 3