Movies: The Big Hustler Jackie Gleason

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Click. The nine ball plops into the side pocket, the cue ball hits one cushion and stops near the center spot. Big as a water tower but light on his feet, with a diamond ring on a pudgy finger, the fat man moves around the table. For 31 consecutive hours, with an almost incredible repertoire of masse shots, bank shots, gather shots, and combinations, with just enough English and the right amount of draw, he has been defending his reputation as the best there is. He chalks up and shoots again. Click. The 15 ball slams into the corner and disappears. Minnesota Fats is still the greatest pool shark in the world.

It is a relatively small part—in Robert Rossen’s movie The Hustler—but no one who has seen that fat man will forget him. A man of understated power, Minnesota Fats is played, curiously enough, by Jackie Gleason, and where audiences might have arrived expecting a million laughs from the most celebrated buffoon ever to rise through U.S. television, they leave with a single, if surprised, reaction: inside the master jester, there is a masterful actor. Gleason, the storied comedian, egotist, golfer, and gourmand, mystic, hypnotist, boozer and bull slinger, is now emerging as a first-rank star of motion pictures.

The Greatest. His talent, in fact, is so elastic that he could probably make a living in any form of show business except midget-auto racing. From his start in vaudeville as a boy in Brooklyn, he developed his galloping wit in a string of tough nightclubs before becoming the Jack of all television. Now, as a serious actor and no longer merely a situation comedian, he is surrounded by competing actors schooled in the Method, but he holds his own with unquiet confidence, bellowing, as he always has: “I’m the world’s greatest.” Entering his new career with appetite akimbo, he has already completed another film, Gigot, for which he wrote the story himself, and in Manhattan last week he was at work on still another, Requiem for a Heavyweight.

Gleason does his new job with remarkable ease. He memorizes at first sight. While Method actors search their souls and “live” their roles, Gleason riffles through a script and is ready to go. His fellow performers both amuse and irritate him with their warmup exercises: while shooting The Hustler, Paul Newman was forever shaking his wrists like a swimmer before a race; and on the Requiem set, Anthony Quinn shadowboxes and dances up and down—”marinating,” as Gleason puts it—for half an hour before a take. Gleason stands around cracking jokes and shouting: “Let’s go! Let’s go!” But his directors uniformly report that when they call for action, Gleason snaps instantly into the character he is playing.

In one sense, Gleason’s sudden achievements should not be as surprising as they seem. For unlike such masters of the oneline gag as Bob Hope and Mort Sahl, he bases his humor on the creation of comic characters—most of them acted by himself. And as the late James Thurber liked to remark, such comedy may be amusing, but it is also serious commentary on human life. “Gleason has gorgeous creative juices,” says Requiem’s Producer David Susskind with purple accuracy. “He is a thundering talent—the kind of raw, brilliant talent that has gone out of style, with as much instinct in drama as in comedy.”

On the Requiem set last week—in the locker-room area under the grandstands at Randalls Island stadium—Gleason was finding out that moviemaking on location can be spartan. Against freezing temperatures, heat came from charcoal briquettes in braziers. Cast and crew were breathing contrails. Gleason sat, like a huge frostbitten gourd, in a camp chair labeled THE GREAT ONE.

It was enough to make a penguin take to the bottle; but Gleason, dieting, munched his Ry-Krisp without benefit of sauce. Although he can, as Susskind says, “put away more Scotch per square hour than any man alive,” he rarely drinks on the job. The Gleason legend has much to float on, but he proudly insists that he has never missed a show because of drinking. “I’m a heavy drinker when I drink,” Gleason generalizes, “because I can put away a bundle of booze before the lights go out. I like it. Some people like to climb mountains. I’m glad I’m not one of them. I’m happy knowing the only thing in danger when I’m getting my kicks is my elbow. There is nothing to fear about drinking if you’re honest with yourself as to why you drink. I have never taken a drink to improve my appetite, ward off a cold, or get a good night’s sleep. I drink with the honorable intention of getting bagged.”

Bagged he gets. He is the national open champion at something called The Challenge, a game of classic simplicity wherein the contestants see who can swallow the greatest quantity of booze before falling over, heels in the air. Dressed in red ties and baseball hats, Gleason and Actor Paul Douglas once got ready for a major league battle, but Gleason said. “Let’s fungo a few first.” The preliminary rounds were so numerous that the contest never started; both Gleason and Douglas were beaned by the fungoes.

Triple Wardrobe. As for his eating, most horses would be embarrassed. Gleason orders pizzas by the stack, has put down five stuffed lobsters at a sitting. He says he has pica, which Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary describes as “craving for unnatural food, as chalk, ashes. etc.”; but what Gleason really has is merely an unnatural craving. Often—and with great will power—he diets, cutting down his intake to 1,200 calories a day. He once took off 100 Ibs.

He is 6 ft. tall, and his mature weight has generally varied from 220, which he calls “slim,” to an alltime high of 284. His neck size is 19, and the nose cone has yet to leave Canaveral that could not parachute back to earth dangling from one of Jackie Gleason’s shirts. His Manhattan tailor flatteringly but fairly describes him as “the best-dressed stout man I know—above conservative, not afraid to look well-dressed.” Gleason orders about a dozen suits a year, paying as little as $285 for a little grey nothing, sometimes going exotic with such items as a cashmere trench coat or pink slacks. He once gave his tailor a single $7,500 order. He is 47 in. at the bulge, but it sometimes swells to 51 in., and he has to keep a triple wardrobe. Each “medium weight” Gleason suit (designed to cover approximately 250 Ibs., his present weight) has a larger and smaller counterpart.

Aphorisms Like Petals. The man inside all these textiles has a stupendous ego, and the only characters who come near him in all of fiction are Spenser’s Braggadochio and Plautus’ Braggart Warrior. “If I didn’t have an enormous ego and a monumental pride, how in hell could I be a performer?” he explains. With something for everybody, he is kind, generous, rude and stubborn, explosive, impulsive, bright and mischievous. He is an outgoing, flamboyant man to whom privacy is sacred. Now he is snapping out wisecracks. Now he is sitting alone, quietly unapproachable. He is too often bored. He is a bad listener in general conversation and a good one when acting. He has a great big kettledrum laugh. He is afraid of airplanes and strangers. “He is all fun and jazz until a stranger comes in,” says a onetime member of his staff. “Then he goes into that fat shell.”

Largely self-educated, he is forever apologizing for his lack of education, but he has no need to: he is informed and knowledgeable. He drops little aphorisms like petals: “A genius is a man who can convince himself he isn’t”; “Television critics report accidents to eyewitnesses”; “To make the world go around, men must have two feelings—unhappiness, to make them seek a better life, and egotism, to supply the fuel that keeps them going when they don’t find it.” He has a huge vocabulary, which sometimes slices into the rough. “Don’t misconcept this,” he will say, or “That guy is a man of great introspect.” But his favorite adjective is “beautiful,” his favorite noun is “pal,” and his favorite phrase is “beautiful, pal, beautiful.”

A Little Pool. Gleason’s historic hangout is Toots Shor’s restaurant, which reopens on a new site this week on Manhattan’s West 52nd Street with Gleason figuring centrally in the ceremonies. “After all,” says Jackie, “I’m the elder statesman of the joint.” A close friend of Shor for more than 20 years, Gleason calls him Clamhead. He has long since earned Shor’s highest accolade: “Jackie drinks good.”

With the show-biz-sporting crowd that collects there. Gleason stands around at the bar, communicating in the limited vocabulary of the milieu: “Pal,” “Bum,” “Tomato.” and “Har-de-har-har.” Jackie compares Shor’s to “the corner candy store when you were a kid, except instead of Jujubes you’ve got the booze.” The famous story is true that Gleason and the 240-lb. Shor once raced each other around the block, running in opposite directions. Gleason was standing coolly at the bar when Shor puffed in. Gleason had used a cab. but Shor, whose giant brain sometimes takes five, paid off the bet before he came to his senses and realized that Gleason had never passed him.

Shor got his revenge one night when he introduced Gleason to “Mr. Joe Shu-man,” explaining that Shuman was a dress manufacturer from Philadelphia and an old Shor pal. Shuman confided that in his spare time he sometimes liked to shoot a little pool. Gleason prides himself on shooting an excellent stick in his own right, and always has (at the age of 13, he became the pool champion of his neighborhood in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, upholding the honor and petty bets of the Irish kids against the Italian champion “from up the hill”). He invited Shuman to try his skill at a nearby billiard room. Shuman nicked Gleason for $100 in a close game of straight. “I’ll bet you another hundred,” said Gleason. Shuman then ran through 70 balls righthanded, 30 more lefthanded, and shut Gleason out cold in a 100-point game. “I don’t know who the hell I’m playin’, but he sure does all right under the name he’s usin’,” said Jackie Gleason—who had been hustled by Willie Mosconi, the world’s pocket-billiard champion (and, later on, technical adviser to The Hustler).

Absolutely Nothing. Jackie Gleason was born in Brooklyn in the winter of 1916. His father was an auditor for the Mutual Life Insurance Co. who sold candy bars to his fellow employees to supplement the family income. His only brother died before Jackie was three, and Jackie was in effect an only child. When Jackie was eight, his father went to work one day and never came home. His disappearance has never been explained. “He was,” says Jackie with a quiet smile, “as good a father as I’ve ever known.”

Thomas Patrick Robinson, Ph.D., a sometime college professor who grew up with Jackie (and was later—as Bookshelf Robinson—given frequent mention on Gleason’s TV shows, along with such other neighborhood immortals as Duddy Duddelson, Crazy Guggenham, and Fatso Fogarty), remembers Jackie as “a big hero in the neighborhood—because of the pool, and also because he was so funny. He had a slouchy mannerism, a duck-waddling walk.” Gleason’s mother worked in a subway change booth and had small regard for her son’s comic talents, and when Jackie brought down the house with his clowning in the P.S. 73 eighth-grade graduation play, he shouted at her from the stage: “I told you. Mom! I told you!” His formal education ceased at that level and, to his mother’s dismay, he spent the next few years standing around on street corners, usually dressed in a grey suit, a pearl grey double-breasted vest, a yellow polka-dot tie, a polka-dot handkerchief, a polka-dot scarf, a chesterfield, a derby and spats—doing absolutely nothing.

In the Alley. For $3 a night, he started to emcee amateur shows all over the city, keeping a joke book with the dirty ones circled and the clean ones starred. When his mother died of erysipelas. Jackie, not yet 20, moved to Manhattan and began to seek bookings in nightclubs. During a three-year job at something called Club Miami in Newark, N.J.. he kept the crowds amused by insulting them, occasionally stepping into the alley to fight it out with a customer. One night a patron smashed him into unconsciousness. It turned out that the patron was boxing’s Two-Ton Tony Galento.

He served as house comic in a burlesque hall, gave a snake-oil spiel for a stunt-driving show, and worked the circuit as a comic diver—but when he was ordered to plunge 90 ft. into a 7-ft. tub of water, he quit, saying “Look. I’m getting $16 a week, and that won’t even pay for the iodine.” His first big-time comedian’s job came at Manhattan’s Club 18. a downstairs bin where everybody on the staff took part in the act. even the waiters and chef. One day Hollywood’s Jack L. Warner caught his act and signed him to a motion picture contract.

“I’ll take Hollywood by storm.” Gleason told his friends, but Warner Bros, today does not even remember that he was there. He was miscast (gangster, blue-eyed Arab) in a few pictures and spent most of his time performing at Slapsie Maxie’s nightclub. Gleason would drink iced-tea tumblers full of whisky (“No booze, no laughs” was his motto) before going onstage to sing and dance and do improvisations, low comedy, and devastating imitations of more celebrated performers. Retreating to New York, and turned down for service in World War II on physical grounds, Gleason spent several professionally lean years doing club work and bit parts in Broadway shows.

Art & Oxygen. Then in 1949 he began the TV parlay that soon made him television’s No. 1 star. He started with Cavalcade of Starpon the old Dumont network, a variety show during the course of which he developed the Gleason characters that were to become as nationally familiar as the face on the $1 bill: Reggie Van Gleason, the patrician sot; Charlie Bratton, the loudmouth; the Poor Soul, who always got into trouble trying to do things for other people; Joe the Bartender, the 3¢ philosopher—all played by Gleason and all representing some aspect of Gleason himself.

But no skit on the show caught on like The Honeymooners, the ironically titled description of a Brooklyn couple who had been married for ten years and fighting for nine years and twelve months. It was broad, low-median but honest humor, perhaps the best situation comedy that has ever been on television. As Ralph Kramden. husband and bus driver. Gleason stared with massive malevolence at his mother-in-law and pounded the kitchen table, a big man with big gestures under a half-acre of black curls. He looked like a big basset hound who had just eaten W. C. Fields, his expression a melange of smugness, mischievousness, humility, humor, guilt, pride, warmth, confidence, perplexity, and orotund, bug-eyed naivete.

“Jackie Gleason is an artist of the first rank,” wrote Novelist John O’Hara. “An artist puts his own personal stamp on all of his mature work, making his handling of his material uniquely his own. Millions of people who don’t give a damn about art have been quick to recognize a creation. Ralph Kramden is a character that we might be getting from Mr. Dickens if he were writing for TV.”

With Art Carney as Ed Norton, the sewer worker. Joyce Randolph as Norton’s wife and Audrey Meadows as Alice Kramden, Gleason carried The Honeymooners out of Cavalcade and into the major leagues on CBS’s The Jackie Gleason Show, always running nearly every aspect of the production himself, from set designing to bit-part bookings. He worked so hard that he sometimes had to be given oxygen on the set. In 1954 he broke his leg and ankle during a performance.

Money & Cologne. In 1955 he set The Honeymooners up on their own as a half-hour show. Buick signed him up with one of the largest contracts in the history of TV—$11 million for three seasons. At that moment, Gleason was the biggest thing in show business. But, as an accomplished catnapper, he fell asleep at the signing table and had to be awakened to scratch his signature on the contract.

For his headstrong rule of his own roost, Gleason had a mixed reputation around CBS: “There is only one way to do things.” said the voices in the washroom, “the Gleason way.” He refused to rehearse, treated scriptwriters with such scorn that one producer claims “we had to hire a liaison man between Gleason and his scriptwriters.” Nonetheless, the company thought enough of his talents to agree to pay him $100,000 a year every year from 1957 through 1972. Gleason does not have to work for the money. It is paid to him simply to keep him from working for any other network. He called the $100,000 “peanuts.” but he took it anyway. It represented another concession from what he calls “the hierarchy”—a general term he often uses to indicate all the “frat-pin boys,” the college men with diplomas who make the ultimate rules by which he has to live. “All the buildings on Madison Avenue are conning towers,” he says, and “any television executive must have one very important attribute: cologne.”

After 39 weeks of The Honeymooners, Gleason reports, he called Buick and told them to keep the rest of their $11 million, explaining that it was impossible to maintain good material at the accelerated pace. “You’ll have to give us time to think it over.” said Buick. nonplused. They thought it over and finally agreed. Like all TV phenomena. Gleason had reached a peak and was apparently in decline. In 1957-58, he took a year off.

The Spender. But the boy from Brooklyn had it made financially, and he knew it. He became the biggest of the big-time spenders, and has kept it up. Jackie saves little and gambles as if he were using Monopoly scrip. He is willing to bet $100 a hole in a golf game, and he lost $3,000 on a wager that Grace Kelly would never marry the Prince of Monaco. With him, betting is as direct a challenge as Indian wrestling. Says Arthur Godfrey: “I understand that he finds out what his opponent’s top wager is and then bets him twice that.”

His gifts to friends, usually expensive and conventional, often run wild and combine with a boisterous taste for practical jokes. To various people he has given a pig. a goat, a horse 600 Ibs. of manure, a dozen rabbits, a truckload of used furniture, a tiny monkey, and a basketful of shrunken heads. One recipient retaliated by sneaking into Gleason’s bathroom and filling the tub with Jello.

His gifts to charity are also endless—$100 here, $1.000 there, a check to the family of a fireman whose death he read about in the papers, continual subsidies to a Catholic institute in New England of which he is the chief financial supporter. But he never talks about his charitable giving.

Gleason’s newest pride is a $30,000, two-toned (opal and burgundy) Rolls-Royce, and he boasts that the front bumper arrives at any selected destination about “three weeks ahead of me.” But his most spectacular acquisition is the $650,000 office-home which he has built for himself near Peekskill, N.Y. Comedian George Jessel describes the place as “a sort of bar with a built-in house.” It is basically an immense rotunda, with circular rooms, circular terraces, circular shower baths, and a circular skydome. It has a 270-ton fireplace-barbecue pit of white Carrara marble, a piano that revolves majestically, and a stereo machine that plays 400 selections. Called ”Round Rock.” the house would certainly make Samuel Taylor Coleridge think he was back in Xanadu, for past it flows one of the minor rivers of Westchester County, complete with trout, perch, smallmouth bass and fat, fat catfish.

Gleason stoutly asserts that the place is a “studio,” designed for business and even for broadcasting TV shows. He points out that he himself lives in another, quite ordinary house elsewhere on the twelve-acre property. So the pool table is covered with light blue felt instead of the standard green—”blue happens to photograph better on television.” So the one bed in the house is 8 ft. in diameter and absolutely round—all sorts of people in Brooklyn, says Gleason. are buying round beds these days.

Fairway & Broadway. During his year off, Gleason took up golf. As in everything else, he was determined to be “the best.” “He was out on the course practicing before the caddies got up,” says a friend. Soon he was shooting in the low Sos, occasionally dipping into the 705. He goes around on an electric cart, playing as many as 72 holes a day. He has played with Toots Shor and says of the great-bellied Clamhead. “If he puts the ball where he can hit it. he can’t see it, and if he puts it where he can see it. he can’t hit it.” Perhaps because of his pool-trained eye, Gleason is best with a putter. Last season, while losing a handicap match on TV to Open Champion Arnold Palmer, he sank putts of well over 40 ft. on two consecutive greens.

He also cut a few records during his “idle” year. For Gleason, a man of in numerable parts, is a writer of music, too. He picks out tunes with one finger and ‘ has an arranger dress them up. He has written themes for his TV shows, and he did all of the score for Gigot. Since the early ’50s. he has turned out some 30 albums with titles like Music to Change Her Mind and subtitles like Music for Sippin’, Listenin’, Dancin’ and Lovin’. It is mainly quiet, seductive music that suggests Log Cabin syrup poured over a slowly turning pizza. The records have sold close to 5,000,000 copies and have grossed about $17 million.

Time of Decision. But the year off seems to have been a time of decision for Gleason. Late in 1958, he took on a role as a serious actor — in a television produc tion of Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life. To nearly everybody’s astonishment, he was enormously impressive. Then Producer David Merrick asked him to play the blissfully besotted Uncle Sid in Take Me Along-the musical version of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah! Wilderness. His collision with Merrick, whose ego matches his. was Homeric. “What’s the highest straight salary ever paid to a Broad way actor?” asked Gleason. Merrick said he thought it was $5,000 a week. Gleason demanded and got $5,050. He also insisted on an extra dressing room and a chauffeur-driven car. Once rehearsals be gan. Merrick grumbles, “he’d say if he couldn’t have his way on this or that, ‘I’ll get sick.’ ” Temperamentally unsuited to the night-in-night-out routine of Broadway. Gleason was bored with the show when it was still in Boston, but— bursting onstage saying “Get a load of all the bottle babies,” and dancing as lightly as a weather balloon in the stratosphere—he won unreserved praise from such alto-brows as New Yorker Critic Kenneth Tynan and Sir Laurence Olivier. He also won the Antoinette Perry award as the season’s outstanding actor in a musical.

Divided Family. In Paris last spring for the filming of Gigot (in which he plays a deaf-mute). Gleason was asked by an A.P. reporter what he thought of French girls. He refused to comment, saying: “I just happen to be a one-girl guy.” The one girl at the moment is Honey Merrill, a bright, pretty, former showgirl who helps in Gleason’s office and has loved him devotedly for five years. Before that. Gleason’s steady companion was Marilyn Taylor, dancer and younger sister of his choreographer on The Jackie Gleason Show. She eventually left him because it was clear that Jackie would never be free to marry her.

In 1936 Gleason had married Genevieve Halford, a dancer. Over the years. Gleason was home-again-gone-again. They got a legal separation in 1954. He takes all the blame. His two daughters are now adults (one is married and the other is finishing college at Washington’s Catholic University), and there is no chance that their parents will reunite. Nor is there any chance of a divorce. Although Jackie does not practice Roman Catholicism, as his friend Jack Haley says, “he believes in it.”

Question of Faith. He not only believes in it, he thinks about it to a degree that would amaze all the people whose impression of Gleason goes no deeper than what they read in the work of Broadway columnists. “Whenever I hear someone say that religion is their own personal affair, I’m irritated,” he says. ”Religion can’t be called personal. The health of your religion determines the compassion, sympathy, forgiveness, and tolerance you give to your fellow man. I have studied different religions to see if there was one more attractive for me. I only discovered I was seeking a religion that was more compatible to my way of living. I remained a Catholic. It wasn’t comfortable, but what religionis to a sinner? While I might not carry out my obligations in any manner tobe commended, at least I know where I stand.”

His study of religions has led to extensive research in the field of psychic phenomena. He has hundreds of volumes on the subject. He is an accomplished hypnotist. He has even held sessions with spiritualists. He has started to write a novel called Brother Miracle, tying psychic phenomena to religion in the story of a monk who experiences an extraordinary manifestation of psychic power. The novel’s conclusion, says Jackie, is that “faith is to be placed in God and not in bizarre activities.”

Last week Jackie Gleason’s own activities were not so bizarre as they often are when his time is his own. Working hard at his new film, he was up at dawn every morning, plowing through take after take all day until 7 p.m. But he found time to irradiate at least one afternoon, sitting on a favorite banquette at Manhattan’s 21 Club (a temporary off-Shor island), buying drinks for friends, marshaling waiters like a field general.

If he had an air of self-confidence, he was entitled to it. His new career as a movie actor is seemingly unlimited: he has already signed for Soldier in the Rain, under the direction of Blake Edwards (Breakfast at Tiffany’s), and he is completing negotiations for another film, as yet untitled. that will be directed by Robert Rossen (The Hustler ). But if. by some improbable fiscal catastrophe, all the things he has going for him should come crashing down, if CBS should go bankrupt and his $100,000 a year be cut off. if Hollywood should evaporate, and the $650,000 house in Peekskill were to float away on the little stream it straddles, Jackie Gleason would still have a way to stay solvent. Since the age of 13, he has had something to fall back on. As Paul Newman says at the fadeout of The Hustler: “Fat man, you shoot a great game of pool.”