Whenever he opens his mouth, Fred Allen breathes brightcracks. The cream of them add up to his weekly radio hour, which grosses his troupe $10,000 and nets him personally $4,000 a week.
Barbs dipped in satire and timely nonsense — a rare blend of humor, that! Its exponents in modern times have been few. James McNeill Whistler. Mark Twain. Wilson Mizner. Will Rogers. Today the species is extinct — except for Fred Allen.
Mr. Allen is not the matinee-idol type. His face is somewhat a cross between the elder Jukes' and Charlie Chan's. His teeth are chipped — the result of a juggling act back in the Dark Ages of Vaudeville when he held a fork in his mouth and caught turnips thrown from the audience. Of his voice, O. O. McIntyre once said, "Allen sounds like a man with false teeth chewing on slate pencils." This voice, variously described as a "vinegar drawl" and a "parched, unhappy singsong," actually sounds like the dry crackle of brown wrapping paper.
It is told that almost a decade ago a sponsor of household commodities, desiring to hire a comedian for radio advertising, listened an entire afternoon to recordings of applicants. Finally, when it was over, the weary sponsor rose and sighed, "I've decided on the one I want. Get me the guy with the flat voice. He's the best."
Thus, on October 23, 1932, Fred Allen first assaulted the eardrums of radio listeners — and he kept up his barrage of wit until today between fifteen and twenty million people listen to his brilliant dronings.
More than most comedians, Fred Allen has retained a fearless honesty and integrity. When he dislikes something, he tells the world. His pet aversion currently is the Pompous Executive. "I hate vice-presidents," he told me. "Those maestros of confusion!"
However, his aversion of longest standing is radio censorship. He has an almost monthly joust with the Demon Taboo. Once he prepared a joke about a dog in a hotel room that barked whenever the man next door came home, because the man was a Pole. This was blue-penciled lest it insult the Polish people. So, with great patience, Allen changed "Pole" to "Mr. Post" — and got his laugh anyway.
Because Allen doesn't pull his punch lines, his gags often miss the funny bone and fall on the corn. There was the time he spun a story about "the poor fellow who wanted to be a pharmacist but who flunked in chow mein." The drugstore heads raged at that one. Another time he sighed, "Ah, those Philadelphia hotels! Why, I know one where the rooms are so small the mice are humpbacked!" The Philadelphia Hotelkeepers Association almost lynched him.
Perhaps the biggest fuss resulted from a program over a year ago when, for his weekly Guest Star or the Person You Didn't Expect to Meet, he interviewed Mr. Lawrence Duffy, aged doorman of the Hotel Astor. "Now, in the good old days," sighed Doorman Duffy, "I once got a tip of a hundred dollars!"
"Yes," agreed Fred Allen; "back in '28, some of those Wall Street men used to think nothing of buying the restaurant and throwing it to the waiter as a tip. I guess some of those boys still chuckle about their financial pranks as they're sitting around up in Sing Sing today."
This brought all of Wall Street (that wasn't in Sing Sing) down the comedian's throat. There was much gruff talk of suing. Every one was out of temper except Allen, who sat down to his 1921 portable typewriter (which doesn't type capital letters because the shift key has been broken for years) and pecked out this note:
to the president of the new york stock exchange.
gentlemen,
no malice was intended and i am sorry to have incurred the disfavor of the gentlemen. I have considered committing hari-kari on the two points recently gained by bethlehem steel. I have also thought about calling a conference, since a conference is a gathering of important people who, singly, can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done. Both ideas were abandoned in favor of this letter to you.
sincerely,
fred allen.
The Stock Exchange didn't sue. It posted the letter on its bulletin board and got a week of laughs free.
This coming May Fred Allen will be forty-eight years of age — and he will be able to look back on a career marked by Gags Greater than Milestones. He was born with, or to, the name John Florence Sullivan. He still uses it when he signs his income tax and radio contracts. He has also had at different times the names of Paul Huckle, Fred St, James, Freddie James, and finally, borrowing the last name of a theatrical agent, Fred Allen. Every week he gets letters from people named Allen who claim to be relatives and want money.
His father was a bookbinder in the Boston Public Library, and he finally got a job there stacking books. To relieve monotony, he juggled the volumes — and this led naturally to amateur vaudeville. When I asked him about those early days, he reminisced with a few rib ticklers:
"My first real appearance took place at the Hub Theater. Billed as a 'talking juggler,' I was too frightened to talk and too nervous to juggle. The idea of the act was commendable for those days. If you listened to my monologue, it would take your mind off my juggling. And if you were intent on the feats of so-called dexterity, it saved wear and tear on your ears. You paid your money and took your choice!
"Anyway, I must have scratched myself on a nail in the dressing room, because the following morning I awakened with the theater in my blood.
"In 1916 a friend of mine concocted a formula for a seasickness cure, which he wanted me to try out. Accordingly, billed as "The World's Worst Juggler,' I set sail for Australia — and for fourteen months appeared in vaudeville theaters throughout Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, and Honolulu. I sailed so much and juggled so little that I finally wrote my agent: 'Listen. Did I sign for vaudeville — or before the mast?'
"Then back to America and more years of vaudeville, under the name Freddie James, from California to Nova Scotia. So many theater managers had mistaken me for one of the James boys on salary days that I reluctantly changed my professional name to Allen as a tribute to Ethan Allen, who had stopped using the name shortly after the Revolution."
His early days, he now admits, were a cavalcade of gags. At sixteen he was saying, "I could tell you a secret about a can of condensed milk, but I'm afraid it would leak out." At nineteen he was cracking, "I don't have to look up my family tree. I know that I'm the sap!" At twenty-five he was mailing ten-per-centers a twelve-page booklet labeled What I Know About Show Business, by Fred Allen, and all the pages were blank. At twenty-seven, dressed in a suit ten sizes too large for him, he'd amble out on the stage and explain, "You see, my suit was tailored in New Rochelle. And, of course, I'm a much bigger man in New Rochelle than I am here in New York."
In those days, whenever a quip got only weak or light applause, Allen would turn in the direction of the applause and say touchingly, "Thank you, mother."
During his hectic career Allen was involved in two major feuds — one fact and one phony. The real one occurred when he was doing Broadway musicals with Clifton Webb and Libby Holman. For a while he teamed with comic Jimmy Savo, until little Jimmy began to feel that Allen's acid quips were making him appear sillier than was necessary. He finally challenged Allen to an alley fight. That was the end of the team. But Fred Allen still can't help giving his ex-partner the verbal hot-foot. Recently, when asked about Savo, he flipped:
"Jimmy Savo had given a piece of his mind to so many people that by the time he got working with me he had only a fragment left!"
Allen's other feud, pure fiction, began with gags about Jack Benny's inability to play The Bee on his violin, greatly increased the Crossleys of both funny men, and culminated in Paramount starring both in Love Thy Neighbor, which earned Fred Allen $100,000.
The feud with Benny has shaken some of Allen's best gags out of his system. Typical anti-Benny barbs:
"The only girl that ever looked twice at Jack Benny was Robert Ripley's secretary. And she didn't believe it. Benny a great lover? He's set Cupid back two hundred years! Oh, yes, indeed, Jack is a very funny man. Five minutes with him and your sides ache. Every time he tells a joke he punches you in the stomach."
While Allen hates Hollywood sham and front, he can kid about the town, too. "I'm always afraid I'll wake up at twelve o'clock in Hollywood and find the place turned back into a pumpkin! I went to the Brown Derby while there. It's a popular café where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars. And Ciro's, the Brown Derby with White Tie, where movie stars mistake each other for movie stars. It's where you meet the producer, a dynamic ulcer in charge of making a picture — and where you don't meet the assistant producer, the man who gets fired when the producer makes a bad film!"
Radio is Allen's first love. He sets each gag for each show like an architect planning the Taj Mahal. As a result, he keeps his nose inside his apartment, out of his 4,000 collected joke books, but sniffing nine daily newspapers and four weekly magazines for comedy news and leads. "My week is budgeted like a recipe for a nervous breakdown," he says.
And it really is. He will spend three entire nights writing copy that will last only five minutes on the air. Three fifths of the show's dialogue is spoken by him, and the rest belongs to Guests and to the Mighty Allen Art Players. Every gag is his own — and no other comedian in the United States can say that! Once he tried hiring gag writers. Even hired Frank Sullivan. But no use. Today he hires four idea men who suggest skits for him to build up.
He goes out only two nights a week, either to dinner and theater or to a prize fight. He takes boxing lessons on Tuesday afternoons, and spends another two-hour session in the gym during the week. "Exercise?" he will laugh. "Well, I like long walks — especially when they're taken by the people who annoy me."
He works solid week-ends, except for Sunday Mass. A good Catholic who doesn't drink, doesn't gamble, and who once supported thirty poor families ("The WPA saved him," says his wife), he has been married to Portland Hoffa since 1927, when he was on the stage and she was in George White's Scandals. "As a result," he says, "we had no extended honeymoon, but spent a few days in Water-bury, Connecticut, to make it seem longer!"
Many of Allen's friends are newspapermen. Not long ago one of them, H. Allen Smith, wrote a healthy sacrilege entitled Low Man on a Totem Pole. Fred Allen wrote the introduction to the book. One of his passages on his pal Smith goes like this:
"His current hobby is reading quickly. If a story in Liberty specifies: 'Reading Time, 12 minutes,' Smith will read it in five and save seven minutes. Last year the minutes saved reading Liberty stories under par added up to six days and enabled Smith to enjoy almost an extra week on his vacation (which he spent practicing). In a recent speed reading exhibition Smith sat in a dark room, and a news photographer set off a flashlight bulb. During the ensuing split second of glare Smith read an entire 'My Day' column and got halfway "through Pegler….
"He enjoys looking at people who are looking at excavations. He stands in long lines outside of movie theaters and, at the crucial moment, doesn't go in…. Smith's face, which seems to be receding (from what, I am not prepared to say), hangs down from his hair and rests on his Adam's apple."
Fred Allen told me his three favorite comedians are Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and Colonel Lemuel Q. Stoopnagle. He told me the gag he originated that had been most repeated for years was, "How much would you charge to haunt a house?" He refused to pass on any Hitler jokes, insisting, "I don't know what I could say about Hitler that would be printable. He doesn't inspire laughter in any form."
Publication Date: February 28, 1942