Where Clowns Could Do It All

 

Suspense as in Could He Play Serious?

“Live” and anthology TV from the fifties remains a largely unexplored universe, so much gone, but because so much was made, lots still to ferret out, and free thanks to You Tube. Live performing laid opportunity before artists that movies seldom conferred, a rare option to step out of type and show stuff they had all along but were estopped from sharing on large screens. Two samples of late YT peruse: Boris Karloff as a Nobel-lauded scientist with family trouble (lay-about son Skip Homier, daughter with difficulties Patricia Barry), hour drama called The Shadow of a Genius (1958), part of Studio One ongoing anthology. A moral dilemma tests Karloff ethics … can he take credit for a discovery possibly the product of another? No genre trappings here, as it is straight science he practices, us to treat these situations as within realm of possibility. I took The Shadow of a Genius for precious glimpse of “Broadway Boris,” work we might have seen him routinely engage had rigid genre expectations been relaxed, a nearest to seeing Karloff live and on stage. I once heard him referred to as a “journeyman actor,” a slight to my young ears, though what this better denotes is “a qualified, experienced, and reliable performer,” which Karloff proved he was, especially during the fifties when television and Broadway kept him well and broadly occupied. So glad I took a flyer on The Shadow of a Genius rather than down the hatch again with Voodoo Island or The Haunted Strangler.

Comedians to dabble in drama did so on television or not at all, TV a lab where off-casting was encouraged. Here then was Bud Abbott as foot-wipe agent for stand-up heel Lee Marvin (1961’s The Joke’s On Me), dealt out after first fifteen minutes of a half-hour drama, impression made, him good. Well obviously, he was a "straight man" after all. Maybe Bud relived some of trying moments with Lou, known to misuse his partner where chips were down, or up. You Tube has The Joke’s On Me up to Bud depart, correct perhaps for assuming we cease to care once he’s gone (though I do wonder what becomes of the Marvin character). Seems everybody funny got a chance to not be funny on anthology shows. Buster Keaton did heavy drama for a light beer, Rheingold Theatre in 1954, publicity attendant upon him being something other than a clown of yore. It is on DVD, also at You Tube. I don’t recall any comedian being bad in a straight part. Seems they were better equipped to play serious than those who did it as habit. One to hand himself a stunning comeback for being other than clownish was Ed Wynn, a figure of fun for all of anyone’s lifetime by the 50’s, his former fame at a level few jesters got near. Ed was the whole show in Broadway revues popular for his antics and no one else’s. Ziegfeld toplined him. Seldom-easy-to-please Dorothy Parker was an unabashed fan, a mid-1920 offering, Ed Wynn’s Carnival “by far the funniest thing that has been developed by the musical-comedy industry thus far in the season … Wynn is, fortunately, on the stage for seven-eighths of the time … he carries off the whole show, from his initial entrance to the very end,” which in the case of Carnival, saw Wynn repairing to the foyer just after curtain drop, “asking the outgoing audiences if they liked (the show), and he has yet to take “no” for an answer.”

Here was cheek to make Jolson seem modest, but Wynn had record crowds for proof he was laughter’s messiah, an impression passing years would not rub out. Television wanted Wynn, old acts or new. He chose old on belief no one argues with success, his 1950 Camel Comedy Caravan short-lived, but an Emmy recipient (“Best Live Show”), so fault was figured to lie elsewhere than Ed. Still, there weren’t calls to encore, so maybe his bolt was spent, at least as applied back when first-nighters arrived horse-drawn. I look at Wynn’s old stuff, Camel spots with guest Buster Keaton or the Three Stooges, and figure we progressed since, but who is kidding who? When I grew up, it was fads like Flip Wilson or Rowan and Martin supplying tons a’ fun, or catch-phrases from Get Smart repeated endlessly at school. Such comic gold as spun in the sixties will likely not revive for a present day. If memory serves, these had gone down disposals by the mid-seventies. An ice-cream cone to whoever next ID’s Flip or Dan/Dick, qualifiers under age of sixty, please. The fact Ed Wynn began with vaudeville in 1903, kept at his plow to the end amounts to amazing longevity (The Gnome-Mobile released posthumous in 1967). He rejuvenated the career at a point when most would have bowed out, or bowed to numbing old-timer awards, Ed's miracle wrested off ninety minutes done live (10/11/56) by Playhouse 90’s Requiem for a Heavyweight. He'd be limited to comedy no longer. I know not another from his category who made such a leap, let alone did it literally overnight.

By 1955-56, there were as many as sixteen live stories broadcast nationally every week by the major networks, wrote Frank Sturcken in his Live Television: The Golden Age of 1946-1958 in New York. Idealistic executives (there once were those, if not many) saw live drama as a direct bridge from Broadway to viewer homes, an antidote for junky Hollywood films and radio gone to seed. New talent, fresh young talent, fairly burst at seams of a medium that would ideally serve their artistic spirit. No compromising here, for ours was finally a public that could receive and appreciate finer things, a notion to be blasted in short order, but soothing while it lasted. Live television had a nervous energy --- anything going wrong and you’d see it same as cameras facing the action, like wrestling with verbal rather than physical falls. To this arena came pro cast of Requiem for a Heavyweight, Jack Palance of Method-background, Keenan Wynn with years’ experience in a wide range of character parts … and Ed Wynn, a seeming forever clown, the biggest gamble taken that October ’56 night, for up till a start bulb lit, no one figured he could make it. That story was told in columns and from comfortable distance of triumph Wynn had, later and more extraordinarily by an hour (filmed) drama (1960) that told how close Playhouse 90 came to disaster for using an old dog seemingly incapable of new tricks.

Wynn played Palance’s fight trainer, both past prime. Keenan Wynn was their manager. Rod Serling wrote from an underbelly of pugilism, having boxed himself during young years, thus hep to the milieu. Like any best of live drama, Requiem had sniff of the real, grit seldom stuff of Hollywood, life on terms raw as jerky movement to follow players from one minimalist set to the next. Imagine Ed Wynn that night … late to bed on the 11^th not knowing how you came off, no seated audience after all, thirty million watching sure, but none to tell Ed if he was good, or stank. Come 12th dawn, however, and Ed Wynn is the toast not just of New York, but the country for a whole, word out and spreading that a new dramatic star is born. For this to happen with a young actor was not unusual, as many a future was forecast by success on live TV, but talent which only a day before was written off and unwanted? This was stuff of seeming divine intervention, a reminder that no loser need stay that way, scrap heaps avoidable given luck and pluck. Truest drama of Requiem for a Heavyweight was what it did for Ed Wynn, Westinghouse-Desilu Playhouse staging a 4-15-60 recap of the 10-11-56 cliffhang night they'd call The Man In The Funny Suit.

The Man In The Funny Suit, written-produced, directed by Requiem’s Ralph Nelson, used participants from the ’56 broadcast to reenact panic surrounding Ed’s inability to put aside clowning and be serious. Nelson played himself, as did Keenan Wynn, Rod Serling, guest Red Skelton, and of course, Ed Wynn, a part tricky as any drama enactor was ever handed, for this was real-life him as hapless, slow-to-learn, getting it finally at a last moment, his performance to leave Requiem itself in the shade. Ed had over a four-year interim taken more straight parts, plateau being The Diary of Anne Frank for director George Stevens in 1959. A remarkable transition, and in so short a time. The Man In The Funny Suit had us believe, and I believe it was accurate, that Ed Wynn found it simply impossible to quit being funny for the sake of any part, so ingrained were habits honed over a lifetime. Think about everything he had done since early in the century. Never once that I know of was Ed anything other than the Perfect Fool. I watched MGM’s The Chief (1933, and available from Warner Archive), a starring feature vehicle for Wynn where even mild pathos was a strain, foolishness bred deep by a farcing stage he could not step from even for a moment. For Ed not to be funny was tougher than such commission would be for most anyone else.

I considered others who stepped off curb that was comedy, and how they fared doing so. For large part, these would be experiments for television, a half-hour or so not risking much, object to give viewers a novelty, suspending laughter just this once. And who knows, maybe Buster Keaton, or a Marx Brother, would be good being serious, a stunt worth anyone’s thirty minutes. Keaton was fine as common sense would dictate, for hadn’t he essentially done drama as Johnny Gray in The General, moments plenty for The Cameraman, or that French piece from the mid-thirties, character spots in San Diego, I Love You, or as “Hickey” in the Judy Garland summertime musical? Keaton kept a varied kit from childhood, a one-time Little Lord Fauntleroy after all, plus melodrama he stepped into occasionally to fill a breach. There too was Groucho, Harpo, Chico, each Marx rising to dramatic occasion, Chico doing a Playhouse 90 (which also featured Buster Keaton), about an airliner that disappears in mid-flight. Harpo would play a store mannequin for The Du Pont Show who witnesses murder from his window perch, then has to outrun killers who saw him seeing them, a part the erstwhile comedian plays speechless but, as always, effective. Then came Groucho as a suburban Dad thinking daughter Brooke Hayward too young to marry Dennis Hopper, a 1962 half-hour for General Electric Theatre. Lou Costello did a Wagon Train close to the end, point being these people could perform drama in their sleep, undoubtedly easier than serious actors might essay comedy. Ed Wynn just had a deeper learning curve, but once there, was solid.

Above Two Images: Ed, Keenan, Ned Wynn

Ed had added stress of working for a first time with son Keenan. There had been tension from a start between these two. Keenan felt he had been neglected from childhood, and held Ed responsible for his late mother’s alcoholism and premature death. Keenan also had a drink problem, as would his son Ned Wynn. Ned wrote a book in 1990 that told the Wynn family saga on unsparing terms, himself spared the least. There were sad conflicts here, an only Wynn to emerge clean being Grandpa Ed, who Ned clearly adored. As to Keenan vis a vis Ed, “he had been in a lifelong rebellion against his father … the man who signed the checks but gave nothing of himself.” We Will Always Live in Beverly Hills: Growing Up Crazy in Hollywood is among best of gloves-off memoirs, and a vivid picture of family life as lived on stages and screen through four generations and counting. Ed Wynn would stay a busy actor, and comedian, for the remainder of his life, often enough for Disney as to be a sort of luck piece for the producer. Sometimes comedy bled into drama as if to hedge bets where Ed was used, as witness Marjorie Morningstar, Wynn a loveable “Uncle Samson” who will break character midway to become the Perfect Fool for a comic bullfight, safest bet offering something for everyone, drama as heavier lifted done so by Natalie Wood and Gene Kelly. Features and TV programs referred to in this post are available on DVD, or can be found at You Tube. Specifically, the Harpo and Groucho anthology dramas are part of a multi-disc set, The Marx Brothers TV Collection, from Shout DVD.