Show Business: The Man in the Lampshade

The voice is pure club-car American, rumbling through bourbon and cigar smoke, shaking with hoarse laughter. It sounds like a man imitating what he once feared he might become: a fat-ribbed salesman for his papa’s turbine plant. Rumbles James Gilmore Backus: “I left Cleveland to get away from His and Her towels, people who call cocktail parties ‘pours’ and the guy who always breaks it up by wearing a lampshade on his head.”

Today bushy-browed Comedian Jim (Mr. Magoo) Backus, 45, is one of TV’s busiest players, appearing in everything from panel shows to serious drama. The part may be small—last week he was a relatively minor summer-camp counselor on Playhouse go’s Free Weekend—but by Hollywood standards, Backus has arrived in a big way. Latest evidence: a lusty new (unghosted) autobiography, Rocks on the Roof (Putnam; $3.50), and a recent automated panegyric on This Is Your Life.

As befits a man who is just as funny offstage as on, Backus loves the irony that he now lives a far more lavish version of what he fled. Though his business manager gives him only $20 a week, Backus expects to earn $125,000 this year. The towels in his Hollywood house are embossed Senor and Senora, his party guests love the lampshade act, and year-round his wife keeps the swimming pool at a decadent 89°. “On cold winter nights,” says he, “the steam rising from it causes the place to look like the set of Wuthering Heights.”

Out of Alcatraz. To come full circle, Backus first had to get out of taut Kentucky Military Institute outside Louisville —”an Alcatraz with tuition,” where his best pal was “Cadet Slob” Victor Mature. “I predict you’ll wind up in the gutter,” said the commandant.

Backus hurtled off to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, emerged in Depression-ridden 1933 when there were only six plays on Broadway. He ate one daily meal at an actors’ soup kitchen, posed for sinister pictures in True Story Magazine. After several lean years, he got steady work in radio soap operas. He soon played in three shows a day at $30 apiece, often did 25 a week.

For 14 years the work was profitable but depressingly anonymous. What finally got Backus better known was turning the lampshade boor into a radio character. Name: Hubert Updyke III, a hilarious snob who insisted that his ancestors landed at Cadillac Rock. Hubert bought cars by the gross, drove around with Guy Lombardo’s Royal “Canoodians” instead of a radio, had a little man on the hood to work as a windshield wiper.

Stand the Pain. After three years with Updyke on radio. Backus fell into a fat part as the judge on TV’s now-defunct I Married Joan comedy series, whose reruns are still “in orbit.” Discovered at last, Backus made 47 feature movies (best role: James Dean’s father in Rebel Without a Cause). But Backus (“always too early or too late”) began his movie career at the start of Hollywood’s slump. He often suspects that papa was right. Once that businesslike gentleman from Cleveland sniffed scornfully around the movie lots, pronounced one studio a “firetrap” and another “land poor.” Soon afterwards, the first studio had a fire and the other has since taken to drilling for oil to boost the bankroll.

Last year, feeling “like a Zeppelin commander,” Backus took another fling at radio with his own ABC show, but that soon got outrated (“How can Nielsen survey radio without hiring motorcycle cops?”). Now back in TV. Backus takes a lively but dim view of it. He deplores TV’s headlong rush to “brutal frankness” by interviewers, westerns and private eyes: “Soon they’ll have a quiz show called Stand the Pain. The plateaus will rise from $10 for each fingernail yanked off with a pair of pliers to $500 for each runaway slave you bring to the studio.” As for the ‘honor of being “done” by This Is Your Life, he rumbles: “The presents are nice, but they gave my wife that damn charm bracelet. Those bangles and bingles are driving me crazy. It sounds like she’s making love to a Good Humor man.”