TV's Ad Glibber

"Welcome to a show called Shambles," Allen is apt to say when things begin getting out of hand. "It's that kind of program," he'll insist, smiling, "a sloppy one."

The comment is a fair sample of Steve Allen's unpretentious wit, but not a very accurate description of his program. For though Tonight is largely unrehearsed and about as relaxed as Steve himself, it is one of the most entertaining shows on television, sparked with sophisticated satire and Allen's own brand of adult, ad lib wit. In six short months, Tonight has replaced old Charlie Chan movies as America's favorite form of late viewing pleasure and Steve Allen has become such a national celebrity, NBC selected him to star in three of their spectaculars and the television industry picked him to hand out their coveted Emmy awards.

A new star wasn't born six months ago, however. Steve Allen has been kicking around radio and television for some ten to twelve years and has actually been doing the same sort of shows for the past six or seven. "I'm still being referred to as a 'new comic'," Steve admits, "but I'm only new to the people who are seeing me for the first time." Several years ago he had an unsponsored late evening radio show on the West Coast that prompted Al Jolson to remark, "I never thought I would see the day when a sustaining show was the greatest on the air," and Groucho Marx to observe dryly, "Allen, the trouble with you is you're too damn good."

Allen is almost too damn good. He's probably the best ad libber on television, he's both a comedian and a humorist (there's a difference), a song writer, author, poet, pianist, singer and, without having to work at it, a very likeable guy. His television show, Tonight, is remarkable in that it gives him the opportunity to display almost all of these talents. "I'm probably being given more freedom than anyone else in the business," he says happily, "and that's just the way I like it."

He was born the day after Christmas, 1921, to the vaudeville team of Montrose and Allen, and they named him Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen. His father died a short time after he was born and his early years were spent on tours with his mother (stage name Belle Montrose) and being shuttled around Chicago, staying with various relatives.

After attending more than a dozen schools, he finished his high school education in Phoenix, Arizona, where his mother had taken him for an asthmatic condition. He spent a year at Drake University on a journalism scholarship, but his asthma forced him to return to Arizona. While attending Arizona State Teachers College, he got a part time job as an announcer at station KOY in Phoenix. It presently became a full time job and he left college.

He was drafted into the army, but received a medical discharge after five months and returned to radio work. In service he married his college sweetheart, a girl named Dorothy Goodman; the marriage ended in divorce in 1951. In July of 1954 he married Jayne Meadows, a television and movie actress. They now live in a six room apartment on upper Park Avenue in New York City.

We asked Steve a favorite question he uses in television interviews: "When did you first lay eyes on the woman who is today your wife?"

"I'd seen her in movies," Steve answered, "but I first met her at the Mermaid Room of the Park Sheraton in (continued on page 14)Ad Glibber(continued from page 11) New York. We were introduced by a mutual friend." And what was Steve's first reaction? "It was kind of a shock at first -- she looked so glamorous and theatrical." The "shock" hasn't worn off and their marriage is a very happy one. Both being in television helps. She assists with Tonight by giving him a viewer's viewpoint when he comes home after a show.

Steve Allen's first ventures in TV were guest shots on local shows. His first regular program was an ill fated rural thing called Country Store. Later he thought it would be funny to have a comedian announce wrestling matches. "I didn't know a damn thing about wrestling," he recalls, "so I watched other announcers to find out what they called the various holds. I immediately made the happy discovery that each announcer had his own terms for them, so I made up the wildest names I could think of."

One night, during an interview with a wrestler, Steve had the kind of experience announcers have nightmares about. The grunt and groaner asked if he could tell a joke and Steve obligingly said, "Sure, go ahead." As the joke progressed, Allen thought, "Gee, I know a dirty joke that goes just like this. Wonder what this guy's clean punch line is going to be?" As it turned out, there wasn't any ... and the audience howled, first at the blue gag and then at Allen's predicament.

Allen is past master of the ad lib, combining glibness with wit. One of the most delightful features of his shows, since his West Coast days, has been his interviews with people in the audience (which he refers to as the "Snake Pit"). He has taught himself to talk fast and sometimes his tongue gets ahead of his better judgment. In one interview with a lady from the audience, he asked her what she was doing in town. "I came to New York for an affair," she replied. The audience started to laugh and she added, "No, I came here for a wedding." Steve cracked, "Well, that's the proper order all right." He later conceded, "That's something that if I'd thought about, I wouldn't have said."

Usually, however, his thoughts are well ahead of what's being said. "I'm usually thinking of three or four other things besides the one I'm saying," he admits. "After dealing with jokes for such a long time, you get so you can think them up almost automatically." Speed, of course, is as important to an ad lib as its humor. Often an ad lib comedian says exactly what everybody else is thinking, but he says it just a half second before they realize they're thinking it. Not long ago a woman in the audience asked if they get his show in Baltimore. "They see it," said Allen, "but they don't get it."

Steve Allen has always had the refreshing good taste to credit his viewing audience with more intelligence and sophistication than most other radio and TV performers. He has made a policy of being honest. He freely admits on the air that there are other networks and other products besides the ones he's plugging. "That used to get me into trouble in my early days as an announcer. I hated the phoney way announcers were expected to talk about products. Nobody talks like that. I don't like to be phoney. It isn't that I'm such a nice fellow or any more honest than the next guy, it's just that I don't feel right if I have to say something that I don't believe in, or think is ridiculous."

One thing he thinks ridiculous is the law that says you shouldn't show real money on television -- so he shows it. One night he was talking about a shorty nightgown and discovered that the bottom half of the outfit was nothing but a pair of frilly panties. He held them up for the camera and mused, "You ordinarily wouldn't show this sort of thing on television. It shows how stupid we really are, because a rose by any other name..."

Allen feels that television should be more than just entertainment. "All I do for a living, anyway, is say what I'm thinking. I occasionally have a thought that isn't humorous and I'm as apt to say that as anything else. I function as a human being first and do jokes secondly.

"I was a citizen before I was an entertainer. So, anytime that I feel like saying anything, I just say it. It makes sense, I feel, on a program like mine, where it certainly wouldn't on the Bob Hope or Milton Berle shows."

Steve Allen is very serious about being a comedian. He claims that he decided on a career as a comic instead of a song writer or actor because, "There's less competition and more money." And he's a man who knows his business. He's finishing up the last chapters on a book analyzing comedians, entitled The Funny Men.

"I guess I've always had a few loose unrelated ideas on the subject. Everyone is very comedy-conscious these days. When people get together, they're more apt to discuss comedians than politicians, which is a terrible thing for the country, but it seems to be true nonetheless. It's sort of a parlor sport. You can start almost a fist fight by saying, 'What do you think of Milton Berle?'"

Steve is one of the few comics who really understands what makes people laugh. He feels it is most important for a comedian to be liked as a person. When we asked him just what type of humor he deals in, he said, "I deal in several different types. Occasionally I act in a sketch where you could take the script and hand it to Bob Hope and, by and large, the performance would be the same -- depending on what was on the paper. In that moment, I must be acting as a comedian. Then again sometimes I'll just talk about what happened to me in a super market that morning, and granting that anything is funny at all, I'm functioning as a humorist. I've never really stopped to analyze my own humor, I've been too busy analyzing everybody else's."

Some of his humor is pure whimsy, like his use of nonsense words. A lot of words sound funny to Steve. He's had the habit of using nonsense words or real words in a nonsense way since he was a kid. His current favorite is "birdseed." When he can't remember the name of someone he is interviewing in the audience, he may say, "Thank you very much, Mrs. Birdseed." Or when he's doing a musical bit on stage, he'll announce, "It's Your Hit Parade, with Snooky Birdseed." He says that as soon as he tires of one nonsense word, he adopts another.

"Anything can make people laugh," Steve claims. "Sometimes the things that 'aren't funny' are the things that will make you laugh the hardest." He maintains that there's a negative side to most humor and that things which are the funniest are often unpleasant. He points out that a lot of subject matter in jokes is dreadful, nasty, unhappy stuff, like drunks, people who are so fat that ..., it was so cold there that my ..., his nose is so big that ..., I'm so stiff that I can hardly...

"You can go through a whole joke book and find very few jokes about happiness. Most of them are negative and deal with unpleasantness. That's probably the function of laughter -- to make a really miserable world a little easier to take."

We quoted a remark to Steve that another television performer had made about comedians usually being short of stature and developing into comics as a defense mechanism. We suggested that he couldn't very well go along with that statement. He laughed, "No, not while I'm standing up anyway." (He's 6'2-1/2".)

He does feel that there is something to be said for the idea that a comic uses humor as a defense mechanism against some feeling of inferiority or inadequacy. "By and large, the majority of comics seem to have had a rough early life -- a knocked around childhood (which is true in Steve's case) and many of them come from poverty stricken surroundings." He doesn't feel it's completely true, however, or the most unfortunate people would be the funniest, which obviously isn't the case.

On Edward R. Murrow's Person To Person recently, Allen commented that he didn't believe there was any set number of basic jokes. When we asked him to elaborate on that remark, he said, "People like to believe that there are a set number of basic jokes because this is a confusing world. Most people hate to do any thinking anyway. They like to know that there are seven basic this's, or three basic that's, or that there are only five ways to do a thing. It would be much simpler and better if all truths were already discovered, I suppose, and put down on little 3x5 cards, but that doesn't seem to be the way life is."

These are all pretty articulate and literate thoughts from a "funny man." And that is the reason Steve Allen will probably still be around long after the (continued on page 52)Ad Glibber(continued from page 14) written routines of other television comedians have been worn threadbare. It is true that Allen also employs writers and that he does sketches and satires, but his main forte is his unrehearsed wit. So, while people ponder how long can Gleason carry on? is Berle through? is Gobel a flash-in-the-pan? Allen's future is secure -- as long as there's an audience to talk to, objects to comment on, ideas to be kicked around.

Steve is one of the most relaxed performers on television. That wasn't always true, of course. He admits that when he started in the business, he suffered from normal or perhaps somewhat worse than normal nerves. But he lost his nervousness doing daily shows for more than ten years. Now his complete ease before the microphone and camera is a constant source of amazement to fellow performers. Judy Holiday, who has appeared with Steve on several of Max Liebman's spectaculars, says that he is so relaxed during a show that it actually makes her nervous.

When Allen isn't quick-quipping on Tonight, he's often involved in one of his many running bits which have become as much a part of his show as his horn rimmed glasses and bland manner. One of his oldest gimmicks is reading the lyrics to popular novelty songs as if they were great poetry. "The reason we don't find much good poetry these days," Steve will explain, "is because the talented poets are now busy putting words to popular tunes." Then with an organ background and a straight face, he begins reciting, "Hey, Mambo ... Mambo Italiano..."

He recently ran a beard growing contest with Tonight's band leader, Skitch Henderson. When we asked him how his wife had reacted to the chin whiskers, he assured us her response was very positive and added with authority, "Man, women go for that jazz." Nevertheless, he's clean shaven again.

He also likes to compose music on the air by letting four people from the audience pick any four notes on the piano and then building a tune around them. He's trying to show, he contends, how easy song writing really is. He once won a $1000 bet with pop vocalist Frankie Laine on this very point. To win the money, Steve had to write 50 tunes a day for a week. He wrote those 350 songs and figures that he's written at least another 650. Some of his better known songs are Cotton Candy, Let's Go to Church Next Sunday and South Rampart Street Parade. All this borders on the fantastic when you consider the fact that Steve Allen can't read music.

Besides winning the money from Frankie Laine, while Steve was on the West Coast, he did a little night club work, made two movies ("Down Memory Lane" and "I'll Get By"), wrote a book of poems titled Windfall, and in 1950 became a thirteen week summer replacement for Our Miss Brooks. In December of the same year he came East.

Shortly after he arrived in New York, he was asked to sub for Arthur Godfrey on the Talent Scouts show. He was then jockied around on CBS with first an evening show, then a day time show and also as a regular panelist on What's My Line (which he recently satirized on Tonight as What's My Pain, in which the guest described his symptoms and the panel of experts tried to guess his disease, with two weeks free hospitalization as one of the prizes).

He and CBS parted amiably and it was NBC that came up with the proper format for his multiple talents. The show began as a local in New York and then last September the coast-to-coast Tonight was born.

On Tonight he does pretty much what he damn pleases and that seems to please his vast audience. One of his major problems these days is keeping up with the 2000 pieces of mail he receives each week. "People love to write to television personalities," Steve told us. "You say, 'Good evening,' and they'll write and say, 'What do you mean by that?'" Mail takes up more of his time than the program. He periodically has to ask his viewers not to write for a week so that the girls can catch up on the correspondence. Obviously, Steve himself is able to read relatively little of this mail. He claims that he doesn't receive many "I'll be waiting at the hotel" type letters from female fans. It's more the "You're cute" or "I told my husband he should dress like you" variety.

Often he is so busy during the day that he doesn't find out who the various guests on the show are going to be until he meets them on the air. He's had quite an impressive variety of celebrities and odd balls on his program. They range from the young man who opens beer bottles with his teeth to the time he had Zsa Zsa Gabor and José Ferrer playing table tennis.

Steve's day begins sometime after the noon hour (he loves to sleep) and he usually gets to his offices in the Hudson Theatre around two or three in the afternoon. He goes over his correspondence, works over some sketches, checks musical numbers, discusses guest performers and leaves about seven-thirty as the other performers arrive to rehearse the musical numbers.

He and Jayne have dinner together, after which he usually catches a nap. He either drives or takes a cab to the theatre sometime between nine-thirty and ten-thirty. One evening when he was climbing out of a cab in front of the Hudson Theatre, the driver asked, "Say, are you Robert Q. Lewis?" "No," said Allen, "I'm Dave Garroway. We look a great deal alike." And as a matter of fact, the three of them are often mistaken for one another.

After the show Steve goes home, where he and Jayne usually discuss the evening's show over sandwiches and beer. Steve will then stay up till three or four working on one of the various projects.

His projects, at present, are many. Besides preparing The Funny Men for fall publication, he is writing a novel entitled Presumption and Despair, the story of a marital break-up which he admits is partly autobiographical. He has a collection of short stories ready for publication. A Coral record album of bop fables (fairy tales told in bop talk) was released last year and the book version came out April 1st. And Coral has just released an album of mood music titled Music For Tonight, with Steve conducting and featured on the piano.

For the future, he's been offered the title role in the film version of Benny Goodman's life; offered Broadway roles which for obvious reasons he can't accept right now; would like to write a musical comedy; continue his writing of prose, poetry and music; open a little night spot featuring good jazz music and do an all night disk jockey show from the foyer; do some straight dramatic work; move Tonight around the country and even to Europe, if it can be arranged; tape a Mr. and Mrs. show with Jayne; and, in general, keep busy. Steve relaxes from one endeavor by throwing himself into another.

We'd like to wish him well. Man, we go for his kind of jazz.