Music: Is Everybody Happy?

Ted Lewis, the Pied Piper of Happiness, Ol’ Man Sunshine, the Medicine Man for Your Blues, the High-hatted Tragedian of Song, was back in town. A quarter of a century had passed, and incredibly, the old show was still going on. Among the bamboos and potted palms of Manhattan’s Hurricane restaurant, he cocked his shabby topper over his ancient and leering eye and abandoned himself to his 1920 classic When My Baby Smiles at Me.

He played the clarinet, if possible, more terribly than ever. He went on through his hoarse, posturing, theatrical repertory of songs. (Said one delighted onlooker: “He has to be seen to be heard.”) He asked if everybody was happy. And everybody was.

Ted Lewis has the most durable act in U.S. show business. In 25 years he has never changed his manner, and very little of his matter. Yet despite the fact that the few movies in which he has appeared have been flops, despite the fact that he has warily avoided radio contracts, he and his company can still pull an average of $7,500 weekly out of U.S. theaters and nightspots from coast to coast. Ted Lewis has survived the death of vaudeville, the invention of sound film, the development of modern broadcasting. And he is still packing them in.

The reason is not Lewis’ music per se. His band has at times had first-class hot-jazz players (Muggsy Spanier, Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey, George Brunies*). But usually the musicians are purely a supporting cast to Lewis himself. He is a one-man synthesis of U.S. show business at its showiest. Under full steam, Ted Lewis embodies the Shakespearean ham, the minstrel strutter, the carnival drum major, the medicine barker, the vaudeville tearjerker, the circus buffoon, the ragtime sport—all among the most fondly regarded figures in U.S. life.

Ahead of the Bloodhounds. Theodore Leopold Friedman was born 52 years ago in Circleville, Ohio, took his present name while traveling with a singer named Jack Lewis. Son of the owner of Circleville’s leading department store, Lewis ran away from home to join Dr. Cooper’s Herb Medicine Show as clarinet soloist. Later he led a parade of bloodhounds with the Gentry Brothers Dog and Pony Show. In 1917 he got a Manhattan job at Rector’s with Earl Fuller’s band.

This was a poor imitation of the sensational Original Dixieland Jazz Band, then making the word jazz famous. But after two years Lewis left Rector’s with a reputation for the musical clowning that has remained his stock in trade for a generation. It was on the curb outside Rector’s that he acquired the battered, furry top hat which W. C. Fields later taught him to twirl with uncanny virtuosity. Lewis won it in a crap game from the driver of a hansom.

You and You and You. Since those days, the story of Ted Lewis has been one of distribution rather than production. He has played the U.S. sticks from Wenatchee, Wash, to Portland, Me. His wife, who once cooked his meals on a one-ring gas burner, now presides over a massive West Side apartment in Manhattan and a 22-room house at Elberon, NJ. On the main road entering his home town of Circleville, the local Kiwanis Club has erected a conspicuous sign reading “Circleville, home of Ted Lewis.”

But 52-year-old Ted Lewis, now greying at the temples, has otherwise changed very little. At the close of his show he sometimes huskily intones one of his oldtime favorites:

There’s an end to the night at the break of the dawn,

There’s an end to a beautiful day;—There’s an end to the summer when songbirds are gone,

And the roses have jaded away.—There’s an end to your laughter, your tears and your smiles,

And we can’t live forever, it’s true;—There’s an end, so it seems,

To our wonderful dreams,

But there’s no end to my love for [here Ted beams at one after another of his audience] you . . and you . . . and you . . .*

*Now playing again with Lewis at the Hurricane. *Copyright 1918 by M. Witmark and Sons: used by permission.