Jackie Gleason

Jackie Gleason (February 26, 1916—June 24, 1987)(born Herbert John Gleason) was an American comedian and actor often said to have been one of America's most beloved television entertainers in the medium's coming-of-age years.

Gleason is best-remembered for his brashly versatile comedy and swift ad-libbing, particularly in the comic portrait of his Chauncey Street, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn neighborhood in The Honeymooners as bus driver Ralph Kramden.

Gleason repeatedly proved himself to be as capable a dramatic actor as he was a comedian, in films like Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), Soldier in the Rain (1963) with Steve McQueen, and his Oscar-nominated performance opposite Paul Newman in The Hustler (1961).

The early years

Gleason grew up as an only child, abandoned by his father (perhaps the reason he never mentioned Ralph Kramden as having a father on "The Honeymooners"), and raised by a loving, but work-worn and troubled mother, who died when he was 16.

He first gained recognition in the Broadway play Follow the Girls, and simultaneously appeared in small parts in such films as Springtime in the Rockies, Orchestra Wives (as a swing band bassist---the band itself was played by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra), and Navy Blues, but he did not make a mark in Hollywood in his early years. During the 1940's, Gleason developed a very popular nightclub act which included both comedy and music. After the last nightly show, Gleason, already known as "The Great One", was famous for presiding over all night parties in the hotel suite where he lived. Gleason would sit in a chair, flanked by beautiful women, and swap stories and jokes with the crowd of famous, infamous, and unkown. It was said that he paid special attention to members of the armed forces who stopped by, making sure that they had drinks and "dates". It was also said that Gleason was usually the only one left standing after these parties. This was a tradition that seems to have endured throughout Gleason's career.

In 1949, he played the role of Chester A. Riley on the short-lived first television version of radio comedy hit The Life of Riley. William Bendix originated the role on radio, but was unable to take the television role, at first, due to film commitments (including, ironically, a film version of The Life of Riley). Gleason's version was favorably reviewed but was not high in the ratings. Bendix would revive the show successfully in the early 1950s, but Gleason's nightclub act drew attention from New York City's inner circle -- and the small DuMont Television Network.

Early career in television

Gleason was hired as the host of DuMont's Cavalcade of Stars and fashioned a variety hour balanced between glitzy entertainment and his surprising comic versatility. He became one of the few major hits DuMont would enjoy from 1950 to 1952. With splashy dance numbers framing the show, Gleason began to develop sketch characters that would stay with him for many years, and in 1952 he accepted an offer to move his extravaganza -- renamed The Jackie Gleason Show -- to CBS, where he became the nation's number two-rated TV show behind another CBS institution, I Love Lucy.

On CBS, he amplified the glitz with splashier, Busby Berkley-inspired opening numbers by the precision-choreographed June Taylor Dancers, before an opening monologue punctuated by a cigarette in one hand and his incessant sipping from a coffee cup. (Gleason always implied that there was something stronger than coffee in the cup; it was generally reported to be champagne.) Then, he would shuffle comically toward the wing ("A little travelin' music, Sam!", he'd call to bandleader Sammy Spear), or thrust his hand toward the wing and hail, "And awa-a-aay we go!" The phrase became one of his trademarks, and a national catchphrase.

Gleason, in real life, was a hard drinker, but he once told of a six-hour talk session with Richard Nixon where both drank Scotch. At the end of the evening, Gleason said he could barely stagger from the room, while Nixon walked out "as straight as a soldier".

Gleason's comic characters included the understated Poor Soul, played silently and capable of coming to grief or to surprised pleasure in the most otherwise mundane scenarios; loquacious Joe the Bartender; Rum Dum (Gleason's body and eye movements when doing this character had to be seen to be appreciated); and the character a biographer cited as Gleason's personal favorite, Reginald Van Gleason III, a top-hatted millionaire with an exaggerated brush mustache and perpetual self-satisfied look, who was never shy about savouring the good life, and never very far from liquid refreshment.

The Honeymooners

By far his most popular character with his audience was blustery bus driver Ralph Kramden, who lived with his tart but tenderhearted wife, Alice Kramden, in a two-room Brooklyn walkup, one apartment beneath his best friend, sense-challenged sewer worker Ed Norton ("The first time I took the test for the sewer I flunked---I couldn't even float!") and his likewise tart wife, Trixie. Norton was portrayed from the start by Art Carney. Probably inspired by the earlier radio hit The Bickersons and largely drawn from Gleason's harsh Brooklyn childhood ("Every neighborhood in Brooklyn had its Ralph Kramdens," he said years later), these sketches became known as The Honeymooners, and customarily centered around Ralph Kramden's incessant get-rich-quick schemes, the tensions between his ambitiousness and Norton's scatter-brained aid and comfort, and the inevitable clash ("Bang! Zoom! Off to the moon, Alice!") when sensible Alice tried to pull his crazy, harebrained head back down from the clouds ("I got a BIIIIIG mouth!").

The Honeymooners first turned up on Cavalcade of Stars'' on October 5th, 1951, with Carney as Norton (although Carney played a cop in the first sketch) and spirited character actress Pert Kelton as Alice. Critics note that the Honeymooners sketches with Kelton were much darker and fiercer than the subsequent softened and more sentimental versions with Audrey Meadows, who is currently the most-remembered Alice due to the saturation telecasting for decades of her version; the Kelton sketches were considered "lost" until the 1980s. In the two later versions (first with Audrey Meadows as Alice, then Sheila MacRae playing the part in the hour-long musicals of the 1960s), Gleason's character had a beautiful, young wife, but in the original sketches with Kelton, Ralph is a frustrated fat man with a middle-aged battle-axe wife whose looks have faded, and the intense arguments between the two could be harrowingly realistic.

When The Jackie Gleason Show—including The Honeymooners— moved to CBS, Kelton had been blacklisted and wasn't part of the move. Her name had turned up in Red Channels, the book that listed and described supposed Communists and Communist sympathisers in television and radio. Gleason reluctantly let her leave the cast, with a cover story for the media that she had "heart trouble." He also turned down a younger, prettier actress sent to audition to replace Kelton, but according to legend, the actress then sent him pictures of herself dressed as a frump with little makeup -- and Gleason relented, especially when he did not recognise her the second time around. Thus, Audrey Meadows became the new Alice and made the role her own.

Rounding out the cast with an understated but effective role, was Joyce Randolph as Trixie. (Elaine Stritch had played Trixie as a formidably tall and stunning blonde in the first sketch, but was replaced by the infinitely more everyday-seeming Randolph the following week, lest Ed Norton's wife be more beautiful than Ralph's).

The Honeymooners sketches were so popular that Gleason decided to gamble on making it a separate series entirely in 1955. Perhaps surprisingly, The Honeymooners so-called Classic 39 episodes—filmed with a new DuMont process, Electronicam, which allowed live television to be preserved on high-quality film—did not catch on in the ratings. It would be years later, in repeated syndication runs, that the Classic 39 would become television icons.

Today, a life-sized statue of Gleason in full uniform as Ralph Kramden the bus driver stands outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City.

Musical endeavors

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Gleason enjoyed a secondary career in recorded music, lending his name to a series of best-selling "mood music" record albums for Capitol Records. Gleason could not read or write music in a conventional sense; he composed melodies in his head and transcribed them with the help of an able staff, led by arranger Sammy Spear. He did likewise with the well-remembered themes of both The Jackie Gleason Show ("Melancholy Serenade") and The Honeymooners ("You're My Greatest Love"). There has been some controversy over the years as to how much credit Gleason should have received for the finished products, but if Gleason indeed conducted the orchestra during the recordings (he was credited as doing so), he had a fine sensibility as a conductor.

Some of that music endures. "It's Such a Happy Day," which often turned up as a theme behind numerous among Gleason's television sketches, turned up as the music for a jaunty scene involving heart transplant recipient Minnie Driver bicycling around her Chicago neighborhood in the 2000 film Return to Me.

The American Scene Magazine

Gleason restored his original variety hour -- including The Honeymooners -- in 1956, but abandoned the show in 1957, leaving weekly television for a year. He returned in 1958 with a half-hour show that featured Buddy Hackett (Carney and Meadows were not part of this program). But this version of the Gleason show did not catch on.

His next foray into television was with a game show, You're in the Picture, which survived its disastrous premiere episode only because of Gleason's hilarious on-the-air apology in the following week's time slot. For the rest of the scheduled run, the program became a talk show (again named "The Jackie Gleason Show").

In 1962, he resurrected his variety show with a little more splashiness (the June Taylor Dancers' routines became more elaborately choreographed and costumed than before) and a new hook -- a fictitious magazine through whose format Gleason trotted out his old characters in new scenarios. He also added another catchphrase, "How Sweet It Is!" (which he first uttered in a 1962 film, Papa's Delicate Condition), which rivaled "And awa-a-ay we go!" for its entry into the American vernacular.

The Jackie Gleason Show: The American Scene Magazine was a hit and endured in the format for four seasons. A staple sketch was Joe the Bartender speaking to the unseen Mr. Dennehy (the viewer) about an article he read in the fictitious magazine, holding a copy across the bar, until the pair were joined by veteran comic and Irish baritone Frank Fontaine as off-centered Crazy Guggenheim. His cracked banter with Joe inevitably ended with Fontaine displaying his well-trained singing voice. (Fontaine had played the same sort of goofy Brooklynite character, then called "John L. C. Sivoney," on radio's The Jack Benny Program; his wider exposure on Gleason's show resulted in the release of his recordings of 'old standards' on the ABC/Paramount record label.) Comedian Alice Ghostley was another regular cast member.

Gleason finally abandoned the fictitious magazine format and re-named his program The Jackie Gleason Show. The Honeymooners was a regulation entry. The show moved from New York to Miami Beach in 1964, reportedly because Gleason wanted year-round access to the golf course at nearby Inverrary, where he built his final home. But the growing popularity of The Honeymooners compelled Gleason to stage periodic, hour long musical versions of the sketch, sometimes recycling vintage plots from the live shows of the 1950s. By 1968-69, Gleason was doing almost nothing but hourlong Honeymooners musicals. Though well received, there were fans who believed that Sheila McRae as the new Alice Kramden and Jane Kean as the new Trixie Norton, talented as they were, were not the equal of Audrey Meadows and Joyce Randolph.

End of television career

At first, "The Honeymooners" musicals helped push The Jackie Gleason Show back into the top five in the ratings, but the audience began to decline after a few years. In the last original Honeymooners episode aired on CBS, "Operation Protest," Ralph Kramden encounters the youth-protest movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The times were changing, and Gleason's program was showing its age. CBS cancelled Red Skelton and Ed Sullivan around the same time. These series had become expensive to produce, and played more to older adults and children than to the teen and young adult demographic advertisers and networks increasingly wanted.

Roles in drama

Gleason had a dramatic side that the comic pathos of the Poor Soul hinted at often enough. He earned acclaim for live television drama performances in The Laugh Maker on CBS' Studio One (where he played a semi-autobiographical role as fictional TV comedian Jerry Giles), and in William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, also for CBS, as an episode of the legendary anthology Playhouse 90.

Gleason's greatest dramatic acclaim, however, came for his portrayal of Minnesota Fats in the 1961 Paul Newman movie The Hustler, in which Gleason -- who had hustled pool growing up in Brooklyn -- made his own shots on the table. He earned an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor for the role. Gleason next garnered excellent reviews as a boxer's beleaguered manager in the movie version of Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), also featuring Anthony Quinn, Mickey Rooney, and a very young Cassius Clay. He topped off a trio of powerhouse dramas as a world-weary Army sergeant, with Steve McQueen supporting him as a Gomer Pyle-like private, in Soldier in the Rain (1962). Tuesday Weld played Gleason's romantic interest.

Gleason did not make that kind of impact on film again for over a decade, when he appeared as vulgar sheriff Buford T. Justice in the popular Smokey and the Bandit film series. His career from that point forward would yield a handful of notably good performances (especially with Sir Laurence Olivier in the cable television special drama, Mr. Halperin and Mr. Johnson) and a hit supporting role that kept him working but wasn't really close to his former best (the Tom Hanks feature, Nothing in Common (1986), featuring Gleason as an infirm, somewhat Archie Bunkeresque character).

The Honeymoon Was Not Over

Gleason did two Jackie Gleason Show specials for CBS during the '70s, which are said to have included "Honeymooners segments" (and in a non-Kramden sketch, Reggie Van Gleason is revealed as an alcoholic).

After his CBS contract expired, Gleason signed with NBC and many series ideas were floated but the only visible result of this interlude was a series of "Honeymooners" specials on ABC, which grew out of discussions that began when Gleason and Audrey Meadows were reunited on an NBC Dean Martin roast. Gleason, Meadows, Art Carney and Jane Kean appeared in four Honeymooners specials on ABC during the second half of the1970s, and during the '80s -- with Carney -- Gleason made a made-for-television movie, Izzy and Moe.

In 1985, three decades after the debut of the filmed Honeymooners, Gleason revealed that he had carefully preserved kinescopes of his live 1950s CBS programs in a vault for future use. These "Lost Episodes," as they came to be called, first aired on the Showtime cable network in 1985 and were later syndicated to local TV stations. Some of them include what amount to rough drafts of what became better-developed Classic 39 themes, but they proved an invaluable addition to the show's legacy.

Later life and death

Nothing in Common proved to be Gleason's final film role. While he made the film, he was already fighting colon cancer and liver cancer. He was hospitalised at one point in 1986-87 but checked himself out and died quietly at his Inverrary, Florida home 24 June 1987. He was 71 years old. In the year of his death, Miami Beach honored his contributions to the city and its tourism by renaming the Miami Beach Auditorium -- where he had performed The Jackie Gleason Show -- as the Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts.

Tributes

On June 30, 1988, the Sunset Park Bus Depot in Brooklyn was renamed the Jackie Gleason Bus Depot in honor of the native Brooklynite. (Ralph Kramden worked for the fictional Gotham Bus Company.) A statue of Gleason as Ralph in his bus driver's uniform was dedicated in August, 2000 in New York City, by the cable TV channel TV Land. The statue is located at 40th Street and 8th Avenue, at the entrance of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey bus terminal. Another such statue stands at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in North Hollywood, California, showing Gleason in his famous "And awa-a-ay we go!" pose.

Local signs on the Brooklyn Bridge, which indicate to the driver that they are now entering Brooklyn, have the Gleason phrase "How Sweet It Is!" as part of the sign.

A television movie called Gleason was aired by CBS on October 13, 2002, taking a deeper look into Gleason's life; it took liberties with some of the Gleason story but featured his troubled home life, a side of Gleason few really saw. He had two daughters by his first wife (Gleason's daughter Linda is the mother of actor Jason Patric); they divorced, and Gleason endured a brief second marriage before finding a happy union with his third wife, June Taylor's sister Marilyn. The film also showed backstage scenes from his best-known work. Brad Garrett, from Everybody Loves Raymond, portrayed Gleason (after Mark Addy had to drop out) and Garrett's height (6'8") created some logistical problems on the sets, which had to be specially made so that Garrett did not tower over everyone else.

In 2003, after an absence of more than thirty years, the color, musical versions of The Honeymooners from the second Jackie Gleason Show in Miami Beach were returned to television over the Good Life TV cable network. In 2005, a movie version of The Honeymooners appeared in theatres, with a twist--a primarily African-American cast, headed by Cedric the Entertainer. (There had been reports a few years earlier that Roseanne co-star John Goodman would bring The Honeymooners to film, playing Ralph, but these plans never materialized). This version, however, bore only a passing resemblance to Gleason's original series and was widely panned by critics.

TV work

Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson (1983)
Izzy and Moe (1985)

Filmography

Stage appearances

Record albums

External links

^* Jackie Gleason discography
^* Internet Obituary for Jackie Gleason
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