The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  The most notable of all the Hanson’s Drugstore regulars was an impressionist in an all-white suit—Lenny Bruce. “Comedians would stand around Hanson’s and banter dirty jokes back and forth,” says Bobby Ramsen. “But you would never think of repeating that dirty joke at the nightclub. You’d tell those kinds of jokes in front of Hanson’s and laugh, but then Lenny Bruce came along and had the guts to go out and do that kind of material on a nightclub floor.”

  Bruce’s mother, Sally Marr, managed a handful of comedians, and she held court in a back booth. She got Bruce his first broadcast gig. Appearing on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts in 1949, he scored with his James Cagney, one of the most common impressions of the day. “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts was as important as American Idol,” says comedian Leo DeLyon. “It was coast-to-coast radio on CBS. Three contestants. They were actually mostly professionals, but they were early in their career. Everyone who went on got a hundred dollars no matter what. They had a big applause meter projected on a screen for the studio audience. If you won then you would be on the Godfrey morning show for the next four days, and from that you would get nibbles from various agents.”

  “Some of the amateur nights that I did, Lenny Bruce did too,” says Will Jordan. “We were not booked the same nights because we were too similar. We did the same things and the same amateurs beat us the same amateur nights.” Jordan and Bruce swapped impressions back and forth at Leon and Eddie’s. “When Lenny Bruce first came by he looked like an Arab pimp—very pale, mustache, big white coat and everything. I didn’t know that years later he would be a terrible thief. I came up with all these bits; Lenny Bruce stole them, and it hurt me. It partially ruined me. He stole a bit I did about [film actor] Sabu and a bit about Hitler.” Lenny’s former manager, Frankie Ray Perilli, confirms that Bruce stole some of Jordan’s material. “Will Jordan has reason to be mad at Lenny Bruce, because that is true.”

  It was a transitional time for Bruce. He wasn’t happy with the material he was doing or the showbizzy results of his Arthur Godfrey appearance. He was booked at the Strand, his largest gig to date, but the presentation house gave him a cool reception. “I didn’t get one goddamn laugh. The audience knew it was dishonest. It wasn’t me.”

  Bruce briefly joined the merchant marines, where his pot habit expanded. When he returned to New York he longed for greater highs. Bruce met up with the diminutive burlesque comedian Tommy Moe Raft, who introduced him to his wife. “I had to figure out a way to really meet this Lenny Bruce,” said Honey Harlow, the future Mrs. Bruce. “I asked Tommy if he had any ideas. Tommy laughed and told me not to worry. He’d bought a matchbox of grass so he invited Lenny and the chorus girls to his hotel room for a J. The five of us piled into Tommy’s room and passed a couple of J’s around. By the time we’d finished smoking them, Tommy’s tiny room was a mellow haze of smoke and everyone was smiling.”

  According to Frankie Ray Perilli, Harlow introduced Bruce to heroin at this time. Bruce was booked for a five-week engagement at the China Doll, a short-lived venue directly across from Hanson’s, which became his place to score dope. Time magazine wrote about Manhattan’s drug trade in 1951 and mentioned the China Doll and Hanson’s Drugstore. “It is a city where ‘pushers’ peddle their wares almost as casually as sidewalk balloon vendors, . . . where an innocent-looking drugstore or cafeteria may be an addicts’ hangout . . . [An addict] named scores of drugstores, bars, restaurants, hotels, nightclubs . . . where she had purchased a fix. The famed China Doll nightclub off Broadway was a good spot: ‘Two or three peddlers hang around there on a quiet basis.’ So was Hanson’s Drugstore at 51st Street and Seventh Avenue in midtown Manhattan . . . ‘You just walk in, get a cup of coffee, put your money down, pick up the drugs and leave.’”

  Lenny Bruce used heroin with Harlow, but for the rest of the comics it was strictly marijuana. Jack Roy, who would change his name to Rodney Dangerfield, relied on a pal of Lenny’s named Joe Ancis to supply him. Smoking pot was a common ritual for the Hanson’s crowd. Buddy Hackett, Jackie Miles, Joe E. Ross—even big names like Huntz Hall and Phil Silvers—loved to get stoned. “All those Brooklyn guys were big pot smokers,” says Jack Carter. It passed the time, it absolved the problems and it heightened the laughs.

  Jack Roy’s first time stoned was a life-changing experience. “One night in Kellogg’s Cafeteria I was sitting with a couple of show folk—a comic named Bobby Byron and my friend Joe E. Ross. Bobby and Joe E. decided that they wanted to get high. They invited me to join them. So we walked back to the Belvedere Hotel. Bobby took out a joint. He and Joe E. took a couple of hits off that joint, then offered it to me. I felt relaxed, peaceful, everything was okay. That night I found a friend for the rest of my life.”

  The Hanson’s crowd couldn’t stand Jack Roy if he wasn’t high. “He had a reputation for being angry,” says Bobby Ramsen. “They called him Angry Jack. When Jack Roy was working it was with an edge.” Comedian Pat Cooper agrees: “He was very depressed and angry.” Jack Carter shouts, “Yeah, he was a bum! He’d hang around Hanson’s. He tried to come into Lindy’s.”

  “Jack Roy was performing in Queens,” says comedian Art Metrano. “He wasn’t very good, but he knew how to tell jokes. We always thought he was like a young Henny Youngman. ‘My wife is such a bad cook, the dogs beg for Alka-Seltzer.’” Indeed, Jack Roy sat through consecutive shows at the Paramount in order to study Youngman’s act and emulate his prolific rate of punch lines.

  Jack Roy bombed more often than not. It wasn’t that he had bad material, but his persona was combative and unlikable. It didn’t matter how funny the material was—the audience despised him.

  For all the talk of a postwar nightclub boom, if you couldn’t ingratiate yourself with club owners, your peers, or the Mob, then stand-up was an impossible pursuit. “It was rough,” he said. “Even then, with hundreds of clubs in New York, no one would take a chance on a kid. All day I walked around in the heat, going from agent to agent trying to get a job in show business.”

  Jack Roy’s marriage added to his frustration. His wife persuaded him to quit stand-up so that he could spend more time with his family. He had just been offered a gig at La Martinique, a major nightclub, but instead acquiesced to his wife. It filled him with resentment.

  “He married her twice and divorced her twice,” says comedian Robert Klein. “I knew her as a frightened, pale-skinned woman.” Comedian Van Harris says, “It was a very bad marriage. One day he walked into the club after they had been married awhile. I swear, she must have been forty years old, but she looked sixty. It was a terrible marriage. Her family hated him.” According to Art Metrano, “Rodney had tremendous hate for his wife.”

  Jack Roy left comedy and entered the world of aluminum siding. “I needed a steady income. So I went into the home improvement business. I sold aluminum siding and paint on a commission basis at a place called Pioneer Construction in Newark.” Comedian Stan Irwin literally rented Roy’s act when he left the business. “I said, ‘Your act fits mine. I’ll rent it from you for X amount of dollars per week and put it with mine, since you’re not using it.’” Roy didn’t abandon show business completely. In order to retain a connection, he and Joe Ancis drove to Hanson’s in the morning to get high and sell jokes to other comedians. Irwin says, “Jack had a file of jokes in the trunk of his car that he would sell to you for five dollars apiece.”

  Years later he claimed he was successful in home improvement and changed his name to erase the memory of his initial stand-up career. The reality is that Jack Roy changed his name to erase the stigma of a criminal record. “I sold aluminum siding,” he once said. “I made a decent living . . . but I wasn’t living.” The decent living he made was not as a salesman per se, but as a con man.

  “They called them tin men,” says Van Harris. “After World War II, a lot of the guys would sell home repairs to people. These guys would all wear the Ruptured Duck [honorable service button
] on their lapel and people would see they were veterans. He’d say, ‘I just served in the army. Now I’m making a living thanks to the United States government—and I can get you repairs for your home. If your roof leaks or if you need new windows . . . I can get these things for you for cheap.’ They would sell these things to the mothers of veterans, and it was a scam. A big scam!”

  Roy enlisted struggling comedians to join him. “Everybody was doing it, including me,” says comic Howard Storm. “They were scamming people, and I hated doing it. I quit after the first week. They kept calling me to come back. I said, ‘No, if I need money I’ll come back. I don’t want to do it on a regular basis.’ They were charging people three or four times what it was worth.”

  One morning the comedians at Hanson’s were waiting for Jack Roy to arrive with his carful of jokes—and he didn’t show up. Nobody knew why until the paper was delivered the following day. The FBI had been hipped to the tin men and had been monitoring Jack Roy. “In a series of midnight and pre-dawn raids, the FBI today collared 15 men accused of faking $600,000 in home repair loans,” reported the Long Island Star-Journal on October 22, 1955. “According to James J. Kelly, special agent in charge of the Manhattan FBI headquarters, loans granted by banks and insured by the FHA were used to consolidate debts, pay off autos and other purposes. Kelly charged that the high-pressure operators—known in the trade as ‘suede shoe boys’ and ‘shingle bums’—worked their racket through a kickback arrangement. Top executives in the four firms [include] Jack Cohen, also known as Jack Roy.”

  What happened next is fuzzy, but Roy somehow finagled his way out of the situation. “The charges were all dropped,” says Robert Klein. “It had to do with the federal housing something or other, but it never came to court. He was never in jail.” But he would never go back to the siding racket either. Drummed out of home repair by the law, he got back in the stand-up game. An FBI sting resulted in Jack Roy becoming Rodney Dangerfield.

  Stanley Dean of forgotten comedy team Norman & Dean has a unique perspective on the transformation. “When I first came to New York, a friend told me, ‘If you want to get good comedy material I know a guy that lives out in Long Island.’ We called Jack Roy and he invited us out. I asked if he would write for me. He said no. I said, ‘Well, then why the hell did you make us come all the way out here?’ He had barely performed and couldn’t make enough money. Years go by. I’m in the Stage Delicatessen. In comes Jack Roy. He was looking to connect with the show folk. You could see he was wandering. He didn’t know how to approach anyone. He was not a very nice character. He was a very difficult kind of guy. He said, ‘Hey, do you know an agent that will get me a club date?’ I said, ‘Well, go see the agents. Go talk to them.’ He said, ‘I went to all of them! They wouldn’t do anything for me.’ It was the way he approached people. He wasn’t likable in the least. I said, ‘I’ve never seen you perform.’ He said, ‘Can I come to your house?’ The following day he comes over. He starts doing his material and I’m thinking, ‘Boy, this is funny stuff.’ He came back the next day and did another fifteen. Every day—at least five days a week—for a month. I said, ‘I can’t be spending this much time with you. I’ve got my own problems. Here’s what I’m gonna do. You pick up the other phone and listen in. I’m gonna call Nat Kalcheim at William Morris.’ I called and said, ‘I have a guy who is a tremendous comedy talent. I think your office would do well to meet him.’ I told Rodney, ‘When we walk into the office shake his hand and say, “Pleasure to meet you,” and walk to the back of the office. I’ll sit with him at his desk. Say hello and nothing else.’ Because this guy, Jack Roy, could destroy himself in a hurry.

  “Nat Kalcheim said, ‘Where can we see him work?’ I said, ‘A place in the Village.’ A little club that seated twenty-five people at the most. I walked in there with Rodney. I went up to the manager [Jan Wallman] and said to her, ‘You see that guy sitting over there? He is a very funny comedian. Would you let him do a few minutes? If you see him work you’ll want him for a few weeks. Take my word for it. You won’t be sorry.’ ‘Five minutes. That’s all.’ She loved him. He was an animal. To see him up close—it had a great effect and the jokes were sensational. His material, without question, one of the top ten comedians I had ever heard. Material, jokes, delivery . . . but as far as the person goes . . . well, there wasn’t much to talk about. But as a performer! You could sense it.”

  Jack Roy searched for a manager and approached Jack Rollins, the legendary force behind Woody Allen, Harry Belafonte and Nichols & May. Rollins passed on him because he was “tasteless.” Roy settled for Will Jordan’s manager, Roy Duke. “Roy Duke was with Rodney all the way in the beginning,” says comic Frank Man. “He told him to change his name.” Rodney claimed to have picked the name at random from the Manhattan telephone directory, but it was actually copped from The Jack Benny Program, which used “Rodney Dangerfield” as a gag name whenever it referenced a matinee idol. “I knew him only as Jack Roy,” says Will Jordan. “I never thought of him as Rodney. I remember when I heard that name I groaned. I said, ‘Rodney Dangerfield? It sounds so completely contrived.’”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Television

  In the early 1950s there was a new force in the lives of the delicatessen comedians, and it brought hope to old vaudevillians, fading radio stars and the new comics looking for a break. It was the emerging television industry—and it was a boom.

  Television boosted dormant careers, from Olsen & Johnson to Buster Keaton. TV desperately needed content, and even the stalest routines made it to air. Television was an exciting new novelty and a fascinating piece of magic, but beyond its status as a technological experiment it was offering little entertainment value. Things like boxing matches and baseball games came across best. But anything that required premeditation, such as a drama or comedy, came across very poorly. Even in the rare instances where the content was exceptional, viewers were often stuck with a grainy image that disserviced quality content. Much of it was lost amid the amateurish technology. Comedian Fred Allen called television “a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.”

  In the days of radio comedy, a program could play in the background while folks ignored it. High ratings could be deceiving. Milt Josefsberg, a veteran writer for Jack Benny and Lucille Ball, considered the differences between radio and television: “Radio was a much more casual medium that demanded less of the listener’s attention than television, thus making it wear better and longer.” Television asked the viewer to sit down and focus—and when they did they discovered that what they were focusing on was mostly shit.

  In 1948, the year that Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan first aired, there was a total of nineteen television stations in twelve cities. The markets were Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Washington, D.C., and Schenectady-Albany. Two hundred different advertisers purchased airtime and 750,000 television sets were manufactured.

  The motion picture industry was disturbed by the popularity of television. TV was a threat to the profit margin, and studios were openly hostile. MGM took the hardest line. The Jack Benny Program had satirized films on radio for years, but when it did a television takeoff on the Oscar winner Gaslight, the result was an expensive lawsuit. The court action lasted nearly a decade, motivated only by MGM’s antitelevision vendetta.

  AT&T was in the process of linking coaxial cable countrywide so that television viewers could watch the same live program simultaneously. It was an elaborate process that took several years. Most television production was concentrated in New York, as the coaxial was linked first in the East.

  Ed Wynn was the first comedian to star in a television show from the West Coast. Debuting in 1949, he quickly used up all his old vaudeville material. “For one season, The Ed Wynn Show saw him dig out every old gag and prop he’d ever devised,” said son Keenan Wynn. �
��For nine months Dad was on top of the pile again. But just as it drained [others], television killed Dad as a clown. His audience began to dwindle, but he was tied hand and foot to his format, doomed like a dinosaur because he couldn’t think of changing it.”

  “The show lasted only a year,” said director Ralph Levy. “I think the audience was getting too sophisticated for his silly puns. The next thing we did out there was a pilot for an Edgar Bergen show. The funniest thing about that show was we couldn’t use the rushes because the men on the mic booms were so carried away with [ventriloquist dummy] Charlie McCarthy they turned the mic heads toward him, so every time the dummy ‘spoke’ we had no sound.”

  Levy next went to work on The Alan Young Show, the second television comedy to be done from Hollywood, which he called “one of the funniest shows ever on television.” Alan Young, a former star of Canadian radio, won the first Emmy for a lead comedy performer. One of the only comedians on television without a vaudeville background, he was awestruck during his time at CBS. “It was all the same one washroom for everybody at CBS,” says Young. “Jack Benny was in there. I was washing my hands, and it was such a thrill when Red Skelton walked in. ‘Hiya, Jack.’ There I am washing my hands and I hear these two comedy legends talking. Going to the bathroom was a real thrill.”

  Among the more significant comedians during television’s first full decade were Milton Berle, Red Buttons, Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason and Phil Silvers. Berle and Buttons were loud nightclub comedians with immediate success. Caesar, Gleason and Silvers came on the scene and added a new dimension with their brilliant abilities as comic actors.