Radio: Nice Man

After seven years’ absence, The Perfect Fool was back on the air last week. This time Ed Wynn’s giggle and lisp, his affectionate idiocy were selling milk (Borden) instead of gasoline (Texaco), as King Bubbles of Happy Island (Blue Network, Fri., 7 p.m., E.W.T.), where refugees from Worry Park (“Step Mournfully, Please”) play make-believe. Though his new program is heavy-laden with Elsie the Cow, singers of both sexes and commercials which are part of the plot, Ed Wynn manages, as he has for 42 years of show business, to make the show entirely his own.

Happy Island is Wynn’s idea. The Borden Co. pays the comedian $5,000 a week for it. It is produced in full costume, with scenery, because The Perfect Fool, who is anything but a fool, thinks he had better get ready for television. There is no announcer. Wynn, who claims to be the first man in radio to kid the commercials, takes very good care of that role himself.

“What’s the name of it?” he keeps asking as Borden’s name comes into the plot, “I must get the name of it.” He has better luck with the word “homogenized” —”Why, I have an uncle who used to go out every Saturday night to get homogenized.”

“Iz.” Unlike most show people, Ed Wynn did not come up the hard way, and he has been a success from the start. He began as Isaiah Edwin Leopold, son of a rich Philadelphia ladies’ hat manufacturer.

Ed’s gift for convulsing his father’s sales ladies by the way he wore the ladies’ hats made it clear that he was not cut out for the millinery business. His father began to catch on when young Iz (the family nickname) forged his name on an excuse from school to see the doctor. Iz went to the local vaudeville house instead. Father Leopold stormed. Iz threatened to run away— under a pseudonym, to spare the family name. Father Leopold didn’t like that, either. Said he: “If you make a hit, nobody will know you’re my son.”

Iz did run away—in August 1902, when he was 16—with a flea-bitten stock company. They gave him his first part: a 70-year-old Methodist minister in a melodrama called Jim Bludsoe.

“So-o-o-o-o.” Before turning 19, Ed Wynn (a separation of his middle name, Edwin) was a headliner at Hammerstein’s. On the side he composed popular tunes. After eleven successful years in vaudeville, Wynn appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1914. The Passing Show of 1916 made him a star. Writing the book, lyrics and music and starring in the Ed Wynn Carnival, The Perfect Fool, and The Grab Bag (1919-1925) made him a millionaire. Thereafter he played in seven more musical shows, all hits, made three so-so movies, and in 1932 became Texaco’s “Fire Chief.”

Wynn has never stopped being deadly serious about his profession. He abhors dirty jokes, knocks himself out trying to please delegations from ladies’ clubs when they turn up at his shows. Radio is not his best medium—he always insists on an actual studio audience—but listeners know the legendary character Wynn has created and react to it. Wynn’s giggle has been with him since he was a small boy. So has his fondness for inventions, like the eleven-foot-four-and-a-half-inch pole for people you can’t touch with a ten-foot pole. His passion for hats, of which he has 800, is as great as Jimmy Durante’s.

His famous “Sooooo” was born on stage in 1931, during the opening night of The Laugh Parade. His mother, who always said “soooo” when lost in her train of thought, was in the front row with some of her old cronies (“the prettiest sight you ever saw”). Toward the end of the show, to give her a special laugh, Wynn parodied her “so-o-o-o-o.”

Offstage, Ed Wynn has had his difficulties. Twice divorced, he says: “For over 25 years my private life has been hell.” One bright spot is his son Keenan’s success in Hollywood. Another is Wynn’s Park Avenue trophy room. Its walls are hung with keys to innumerable cities; appointments as honorary fire chief of hundreds of communities; honorary memberships in the National Association of Power Engineers and the Yale Class of 1924; and a 1934 citation declaring him, along with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Queen Rambai Barni of Siam and Benito Mussolini, one of the world’s ten most charming people. Ed Wynn’s audience would undoubtedly concur. Ed Wynn himself almost does. Says he wistfully: “I am a nice man; really I am.”