Television: The Treacle Cutter

“A year ago my show was 137th in the Nielsen ratings,” observed TV Comic Danny Thomas last week. “Today it’s in the top ten. What can I do after that?” Actually, there were only 118 shows on the networks’ evening air last May when Thomas’ Make Room for Daddy squatted a miserable eleventh from the bottom, a position to which Thomas had become accustomed in the show’s four years on ABC. Today Danny averages some 44 million televiewers, is topped only by the two mighty westerns, Gunsmoke and Tales of Wells Fargo.

In its year on CBS The Danny Thomas Show has benefited from a better time slot (Mon. 9 p.m., E.S.T.) and higher exposure (93 more stations than it had on ABC). But more important in Danny’s rise from Nielsen’s nowhere is that CBS’s Danny has quit striving for gags that were foreign to its situations or strained for premises to justify its jokes. Says Thomas: “Comedy just for comedy’s sake is barking up the wrong cliche. Comedy has to come out of the situation to have any staying power.”

Two Worlds. Thomas’ TV self is Danny Williams, nightclub funnyman, father of two and harassed battler for his patriarchal rights. Says Thomas candidly: “The show is one cliche after another. Family life is that way. When we’re corny, we don’t let it get too far. We use what I call treacle cutters. For instance, the boy gets sore and runs away from home and tries to enroll himself in the orphan asylum as Elvis Earp. I find him and I take him in my arms and we make up and we talk about how we’re going to go out and get doubledeck hamburgers and big malted milks and then we’ll go to the movies and then we’ll have a soda. And then I say, ‘And then we’ll go home and I’ll break every bone in your body.’ That’s the treacle cutter.”

His TV role as a show-business type permits Thomas the best of two possible worlds—the homy and the glamorous. Such notables as Bob Hope, Dean Martin and Hans Conried have dropped in on the noisy confusion of Danny Williams’ family, promptly found themselves entangled in its small wars. Hope stirred Father Danny to unworthy jealousy by offering to appear in a benefit show that Danny planned to star in (at show’s end, Danny properly repented his pettiness). Crooner Martin was hauled in to make the point that bobby-soxers “collect” crushes, and crushes are not to be confused with true love.

“Your Sorrow Unmasked.” Born 44 years ago as Amos Joseph Alphonsus Jacobs, Danny Thomas was the fifth of ten children of a Lebanese immigrant laborer who, back in Toledo, often sold candy to make ends meet. Appropriately, Danny’s first taste of show business was as a candy butcher in a burlesque house. Before long, he was onstage, hamming it up in radio and nightclubs. In 1936 he married a Detroit radio singer named Rosemarie Mantell, today has three children of his own.

In the long years that Thomas was away playing the club circuit, his kids thought of him as almost legendary “Uncle Daddy,” greeted his infrequent returns with “Make room for Daddy!” Remembers Danny: “Daddy was just a picture on the piano. The clothes I brought to them were all too small by the time I got them there.” The last straw came when his daughter wrote a theme in high school ending: “What’s so good about tomorrow? . . . My father is away all the time, working so that we’ll be secure tomorrow, but by the time he does that we’ll be grown up and gone away.”

Danny called on a producer, explained his problem, begged him to find something that would keep him at home. The producer, who recognized a televisable situation when he heard one, devised the show on the spot.

Thomas is now a resolute homebody (Beverly Hills and Palm Springs), occupies himself, off-camera, in remodeling his Beverly Hills manse (cost: about $250,000 so far), or puttering with power tools. A Roman Catholic of the Maronite rite, Thomas has devoted much time in recent years to raising money for a children’s hospital in Memphis, Tenn. (for incurable patients), already has pledges of $1,300,000 out of a hoped-for $2,000,000.

Danny looks like a weird blend of Napoleon and Fiorello H. LaGuardia, sings as cornily as Al Jolson did, speaks as if he forgot to gargle before keynoting a dockers’ meeting. His trademark is his preposterous nose (“If you’re going to have a nose, you ought to have a real one”). But the U.S.’s currently favorite tele-comedian, boasting no single towering talent, succeeds as a funnyman mostly because his humor seems to well up from a sizable heart. Or, as Danny Thomas puts it, citing his favorite philosopher, Lebanese Mystic Kahlil (The Prophet) Gibran: “Comedy and tragedy aren’t very far apart. Like Gibran says, ‘Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.’ “