Radio: Perennial Comic

For three years Funnyman Fred Allen has cultivated a spurious feud with Jack Benny. This week he will begin to engage another comic in a more realistic fight. Having forsaken NBC because his former sponsor Bristol-Myers insisted that his hour show be reduced to 30 minutes, he starts on a CBS network for Texas Co. opposite Eddie Cantor on NBC. This season, as Bristol-Myers’ substitute for Allen, Cantor will be spurred on by a contract that calls for a flat $10,000 a week, an extra $200 for every point over 20 he registers with C. A. B. (Crossley). Whatever his incentive, the going will be tough. With only half the time on NBC that Allen has on CBS, Cantor will have to buck one of the most ingenious wags in the land.

Awesome to fellow zanies is Allen’s ability to concoct his own jokes. Most of them depend on gagmen for their wit. Allen writes much of his show himself, decisively edits the contributions of his two assistant scripteurs. Practically unchanged this season will be the formula that carried his program along on NBC. In his dry, unhappy, singsong drawl, Allen will still handle 60% of the dialogue, manage, between musical pauses, to give his own news of the week, interview unexpected guests, preside over the dramatic doings of the Mighty Allen Art Players. For his famed ad libs a few minutes will be reserved as usual on each of the weekly shows.

The parched despair of Allen’s voice is matched by his rueful features. In the classic comic tradition, he is persistently gloomy. In point of fact, his early lot was not too happy. A onetime stack-boy in the Boston Public Library, he got interested in juggling through reading a few books on the subject, soon became so proficient with balls and billiard cues that he was permitted to join a troupe of amateurs touring movie houses around Boston. Allen was subjected to all kinds of indignities. He was struck from behind with bladders, bothered by flying stuffed fish, interrupted by the appearance of signs reading: Don’t be harsh, he’s good to his mother. Juggling through it all, he was often rewarded by being encircled with a wooden hook, dragged into the wings.

Born John Florence Sullivan in Cambridge, Mass. 46 years ago, Allen during his early career was known as Paul Huckle. Progressing onward and upward in vaudeville, he did a turn as Fred St. James and Freddie James before he finally became Fred Allen. As he went along he added patter to his act, acquired a facility for playing the banjo and clarinet. Sometimes he even broke into song. He did his stuff all over the U. S., spent the 1915-16 season touring Australia. He was fond of old vaudeville standbys, worked up laughs when his audience was cold by greeting each bit of sparse applause with a tender “Thank you, mother.”

In the ’20s and early ’30s Allen was in many a revue. Overwhelmingly successful was his collaboration with Clifton Webb and Libby Holman in The Little Show and Three’s A Crowd. Still relished is one of his japes from an early show, describing a scarecrow that scared the crows so badly they brought back the corn they had stolen the previous summer. Prior to The Little Show, Allen had an unhappy interlude when he teamed up with Jimmy Savo. After wowing audiences with Allen, Savo began to feel that Allen’s jokes were making him look sillier than necessary. Climax of the disagreement came when Allen remarked onstage: “Bring me a mirror. I want to look at my favorite comedian.” Enraged, Savo suggested that Allen join him in the alley and fight like a gentleman. Today says he of Savo: “He had given a piece of his mind to so many people that by the time he got working with me he had only a fragment left.”

Allen has always had a rather low opinion of his fellow comics. In milder moments, he describes them as “the mentally indigent”; when he is feeling testy he refers to them as “intellectual midgets living on borrowed minds.” He is similarly wrothy about studio audiences. “I don’t know,” he remarks, “who’s getting the worst of it, the people looking at the show or the show looking at the audience.” Allen does not like radio censors either. To illustrate the workings of the censor’s mind, he likes to recall a joke he once introduced into a script concerning a dog in a hotel room that barked whenever the man next door came home because he was a Pole. Promptly the NBC censors blue-penciled the gag on the ground that it insulted the Polish people. When Allen changed the Pole to Mr. Post, the censors gladly permitted the jest. Nowadays he always includes in his script a couple of dubious jokes that he can trade to the censors to keep the ones he wants.

Putting an hour-long show together every week leaves Allen little time for social folderol. His customary routine calls for only two nights out a week. On Tuesday afternoons he goes to a Manhattan gym to take boxing lessons from one Joey La Grey; on Fridays he usually escorts his wife, Portland Hoffa, who in their vaudeville days assisted him in shorts and who now serves as one of his stooges on the air, to dinner and the theatre. Allen has been married to Portland, a onetime chorus girl, since 1927. The daughter of an eccentric dentist from Jamaica, L. I., Portland is named after the town in Oregon, where she was born. One of her sisters, whom her father expected to be his final offspring, is known as Lastone; another Hoffa père’s female namesake, is called Doctor Frederica.

Allen has been living for the past year in a four-room apartment in midtown Manhattan. Furnished in stiffish fashion, the apartment includes a well-stocked library equipped with everything from Joe Miller’s Joke Book to the works of Schopenhauer. Both the ancient gagster and the German brooder have been introduced on Allen’s program. He is proud of his learning, and delights in baffling his audience with a bit of esoterica.

Before his mike, Allen always chews nervously on a wad of gum; away from the studios, he substitutes a cud of cut-plug for his Beech-Nut. He regards chewing tobacco as a safer habit than cigaret smoking. “When you smoke cigarets,” he points out, “you’re likely to burn yourself to death; with chewing tobacco the worst thing you can do is drown a midget.”

Allen’s show brings him an estimated $10,000 a week, out of which he has to pay the salaries of his troupe and gagsters. Good guess at his balance would be $5,000. This is his steady income. He recently received $100,000 in Hollywood for making Love Thy Neighbor with Jack Benny.