Plug Plug Plug

Plugola on radio comedy shows was good for everyone, it seems. A company got a free plug. Audiences got laughs. Writers got freebie gifts in return.

For a period of a few years, no comedian seemed to take advantage of this more than Jack Benny. He had a sure-fire laugh formula based on his character being cheap. Someone on his show would mention a product, then Benny would joke that the mention would result in him getting the product for nothing. One show topped it by turning it into one of Benny’s great running gags that always came out of nowhere—Frank Nelson played a man who interrupted a scene later in the show by delivering the product.

Script writer Milt Josefsberg explained in his book about the Benny show that situation wasn’t quite as it played out on radio. Benny would rarely take advantage of the plug, he said; the company getting the freebie would generally send alcohol to the writers.

It seems the idea of inserting plug-gags on a radio show didn’t always originate with its writer. Witness this interesting column that appeared April 8, 1948:

Radio Full of Ad Plugs Sugar-Coated as Gags
By ALINE MOSBY
United Press Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD
The radio shows are getting so shot full of sneaked-in ads, disguised as gags, that you wonder how they have time for the commercial the sponsor is paying for. These plugs most listeners don't know about.
They hear Jack Benny make a crack about which end of a Studebaker you get into. Or Bob Hope spiel about somebody who combs his hair with a Mixmaster. They yak at the gags and figure the trademarks got there by accident.
Not in this bright commercial age. . . . The plugs are out-and-out ads. But neither Benny and Hope, their writers, nor the networks get paid for 'em. The only guy who does is the "script plugger." He takes dough from companies to get their names mentioned in a gag on a radio show.
Gift-Sending Part Of Ad Plugging
Script pluggers, we always thought, were mole-like characters who pulled slick deals with customers in the back booths of dim bars on Vine St. We found one sprinting around in broad daylight.
"This is strictly on the up-and-up," says Joe Gardner.
"We do not," he added indignantly, "pay writers to plug our clients in their scripts. Of course, we send them gifts, but that's just to cultivate their good will . . ."
He operates this way: He takes a script-writer for the Benny show, say, to lunch.
"Got a great gag on a Studebaker," he barks to the writer, and tells it to him. The gag's good. The writer says thanks, he'll use it.
"Everybody's happy," beams Mr. Gardiner. "My client gets a plug on a radio show that would cost him thousands if he bought it as a sponsor. He gets the plug for practically nothing—just the few hundred he pays me.
"The writer's happy. He has a good gag and a bottle of scotch I send him. Benny likes the gag, too."
Free Merchandise Helps Get Plugs
Hey, what about the networks, we said. After all, they're in business to get paid for the ads they broadcast, aren't they?
"Sure, the radio boys raised a fuss for a while," grinned Mr. G.
They shut up, he whispered, after the "script pluggers" began furnishing free merchandise for give-away shows. If the radio folks had to buy all the prizes they hand out to giggling contestants, they'd be out a few million bucks a year.
The give-away show is where Gardiner operates best. He loads 'em down with prizes like ball-bearing lipstick (for making-up under water), things to bake potatoes in atop a stove, egg beaters with low and high gears, shoulder pads for coat hangers, etc., etc.
Each time the master of ceremonies gives one of these treasures away, he lovingly describes it. The lady gets her prize that the show didn't have to pay for, the company gets a cheap plug, and Gardiner collects his commission.
There's only one guy who doesn't profit by this neat arrangement—the sponsor who pays for the show. Why he hasn't kicked up a storm yet, we don't know. Once the sponsor of a give-away show took a test. The ladies in the studio audience were asked to tell what the show advertised. Each carefully listed the brand names of all the fantastic prizes. Not one remembered the company that only shells out several thousand dollars a week so the housewives can win those things!

The most famous plug on the Benny show likely occurred on November 27, 1949:

JACK: And Rochester, the evenings are getting chilly so don't forget to plug in my General Electric blanket.
ROCH: Boss, boss, we haven't got a General Electric blanket.
JACK: We've got one now. (laughter and applause) I'm (ad-libs) oh, brother, will my home be full of General Electric blankets. (resumes script) I'm going into the den and read now.
ROCH: Are you gonna walk or shall I drive you in a Cadillac?
JACK: Let's not over-do it.

How To Be a Star

George O’Hanlon is known today only as George Jetson and it’s a shame. O’Hanlon’s original fame came from a series of funny one-reelers released by Warner Bros. in the 1940s and ‘50s which deserve wider exposure.

The Joe McDoakes shorts weren’t really rerun much on television (unlike one-reel animated cartoons or the Three Stooges two-reelers) and attempts to put together a McDoakes sitcom failed. It’s too bad, because the few shorts in the series I’ve seen are enjoyable. They benefit not only from good comic acting but the direction and writing of Richard Bare. The best of the McDoakes have some gentle spoofing and, at times, they get surreal, similar in a way to Bare’s great TV series “Green Acres,” where the bizarre was accepted as a normal way of living.

O’Hanlon and Bare talk a bit about their light pokes in this United Press interview from 1947. O’Hanlon died in 1989 after a stroke (he had just finished a recording session as George Jetson). Bare is still with us at age 101.

Advice on How to Be a Movie Star By a Couple of Gents Who Are Not
By ALINE MOSBY
HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 18 (UP)—The brothers Warner would have fallen right out of their gold-trimmed swivel chairs if they had seen two of the 2,504 hirelings today. These two characters, ignoring their bosses’ blood pressure, were handing out advice. On how to be a movie star.
Yet they’re quite a stretch from being in that category themselves.
Well, except in a way. They look like movie stars. George O’Hanlon resembles Burgess Meredith a bit and Richard Bare might pass for Cary Grant in the dusk. O’Hanlon and Bare grind out those 10-minute comedies that flash on the screen while you’re out in the lobby having a smoke, waiting for Burgess Meredith and Cary Grant to come on in the main event.
So how come these fellows know so much about being movie stars?
“We look so much like ‘em,” explained O’Hanlon, “that movie stars are always mistaking us for movie stars. We’re on the inside, see?”
Besides, he added, if a movie-towner wants to know something he should ask some yokel who’s not suppose to know. Then he’ll find out.
They gathered their advice by eavesdropping under tables at the Brown Derby and loafing, disguised as lampposts, at Hollywood and Vine.
Then they rolled it into a comedy short, “So you wants be a movie star.” This neatly fits into their “so you wanta” series, which points a stern finger at cringing movie patrons. Things like “so you want quit smoking,” and “so you wanta have a nervous breakdown.”
“We’ll tell you some things about stars that you won’t find in our picture,” hissed Bare.
Here’s their formula. If you wanta be a star, turn bald, elope with your best friend’s wife and report your house robbed once a year.
“A man can’t have more than 10 hairs on his noggin,” explained Bare, parking his number 10’s on somebody else’s desk while we prayed Mssrs. Warner & Warner weren’t peeking. “Haven’t you heard of the hairdressers’ union—Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, Charles Boyer?”
A star should also have a face that takes two hours to paint and four hours to light, our experts continued. Gives the makeup men and electricians something to do.
And when an actor is told to choose a script, they said, he rips the title page from a best-seller and writes new insides. That’ll make him a star, says Profs. O’Hanlon and Bare.
Now we come to a star’s social life.
Our hero, they said, must get married only one (whazzis?) Otherwise he’ll be broke coughing up alimony. His one wife, they said, should have been his best friend’s.
“It’s being done, you know,” said O’Hanlon, glancing at a picture of Van Johnson.
“And for publicity,” said O’Hanlon, “what’s better than having your house robbed?” Or giving advice on how to be movie stars?
An actor also can have himself paged at a nitery for only two bucks a month, Bare pointed out. Of course, the star never answers the page at first. He waits until everyone is looking at him.
Now if you’re not a star in two weeks under this formula, said Bare and O’Hanlon, tactfully examining their nails, better leave town. They are.

My favourite of the McDoakes shorts is “So You Want To Be A Detective,” a brilliant spoof where the killer turns out to be narrator Art Gilmore. I spotted another short the other day so watch it before the inevitable corporate take-down order. The mechanical sight gags are ingenious and Bill Lava cooked up a nice little score. The short was released on June 27, 1955, which seems late to be parodying the John J. Anthony radio show (complete with “Don’t touch the microphone”), but the people watching this at the time would be familiar with it. And you should be familiar with the uncredited actor who plays Mr. Agony. He’s Arthur Q. Bryan, the voice of Elmer Fudd. He’s a lot thinner in this than he was in the early ‘40s.

The Lousy Violinist and Great Humanitarian

Jack Benny, Comedian was also Jack Benny, Patron of the Arts. He and his violin appeared at countless benefit concerts and it’d probably be next to impossible to determine how much money he raised to save orchestras and grand old buildings. One was Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre which, incidentally, was not the same house where Jack played in vaudeville in the early ‘20s. The Orpheum you see in the 1928 picture to the right still stands (the Commodore Rooms and J.T. Wilson house do not), thanks in part to Jack Benny.

Let’s turn the clock to 1957, when the Benny jaunts to concert halls around North America were still relatively new. He talks about them in this United Press story that appeared in newspapers on April 18th.

Hollywood Fiddler Benny Graduates
By ALINE MOSBY
HOLLYWOOD (UP)—The newest rage of the concert world will bow to the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra Tuesday night, tuck his violin under his white tie and play, he hopes.
Everybody used to laugh when Jack Benny dragged out his violin on his radio and TV shows, but now he's graduated into longhair music halls and gained a new "career."
A year ago Benny made his concert debut in Oklahoma City, followed by concerts in New York's Carnegie Hall and Philadelphia. Orchestras in other cities were so stunned they flooded Benny with offers. His 1957 benefit concert tour begins here and moves to Washington, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and London.
BUT THE NEW concert star is taking it all very humbly. "Actually, I'm pretty lousy," confessed Jack. "I don't play at all. But I get through numbers and I try to play as well as I can.
"People who think I can't play are surprised. Some figure I'll just tell jokes and try 'Love in Bloom." But I do these as legit as any concert.
"Mary can't stand my playing," he added sadly. "She says I should be billed, 'Jack Benny and His Frightful Fiddle'".
At the April 23rd concert for the benefit of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, Jack will play the first movement of Mendelssohn's Concerto plus other classical numbers. He's been practicing daily and unfortunately always plays better while practicing than on the stage, he says. "I get stage fright, I guess because I'm playing in front of great musicians," he said.
"It's odd—I'm not nervous about my TV shows, which I should be, as that is my real business. But I'm always nervous at concerts, which I shouldn't be because the public really doesn't expect anything.
Benny has been wielding a bow since the age of 6. His first paying violin job was with a vaudeville orchestra. Before long he was playing on the stage. Finally the fiddle became a comedy prop, until today it is as much a part of the Benny legend as gags about his stinginess, Maxwell car and perennial 39-year-old age.
ONLY BY becoming a world-famous comedian has Jack been able to attain the concert stage. But, on the other hand, if he had only practiced harder when he was a youngster—
"I was like a golfer, who likes to play more than he likes to practice," he said, "If I had really practiced, I might have been very good. As a concert violinist I would have kept my real name—Kubelsky. I would have used just that one name—"
Then he returned to his familiar Benny tone with, "Well, I might have been very lousy, too, so it's just as well."

I suppose one would have to be a psychologist to figure out why Jack Benny took up the violin in earnest so many years after dropping it in childhood. But it doesn’t really matter. In the end, even his playing—good, bad or indifferent—entertained audiences, and helped innumerable orchestras stave off almost certain death.

Screw-ups and Sportsmen

Inside jokes got on the air periodically on the Jack Benny radio show. Some are decipherable; laughter from the band greeted Jack reading a fairy tale featuring a character named “Bertram Scott,” who was Jack’s business secretary. But others are a little more arcane.

On the April 16, 1950 show, one of Jack’s jokes bombed. He then ad-libbed “My writers own an oil well. I can’t do anything with them.” Jack ad-libbed the oil well reference a few more times when the show started dying.

I’ve tried in vain to find a contemporary reference to any of the writers owning an oil well. But I did find a newspaper column that mentioned the Sportsmen Quartet owned one.

The Sportsmen had been around since the 1930s. They had their own 15-minute show for a time, appeared on Rudy Vallee’s and Judy Canova’s programmes and even provided songs for animated cartoons. They had even done some anonymous work on The Jack Benny Program before “officially” becoming part of it in the 1946-47 season, originally playing off the notorious Benny cheapness. Eventually, the Quartet did an excellent and memorable job crooning parody versions of songs that incorporated sales pitches and stock phrases for Lucky Strike cigarettes, cleverly arranged by Mahlon Merrick.

Little was written about the Quartet during their heyday, but the United Press came out with this story in 1953. About the time it was published, the Quartet were touring with Bob Crosby and had stopped in Vancouver with Canadian-born Gisele Mackenzie to raise money to pay for the British Empire Games the following year.

Singers of Commercials Branch Into Own Show
By ALINE MOSBY
United Press Hollywood Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD, May 27. — The “Four Sportsmen” quartet which parlayed a “Hmm” into fame and fortune on Jack Benny’s radio program, said today they're branching into their own show so they can really sing.
The four male crooners thank Benny hourly for giving them overnight success on his CBS program. But, they sighed, they can only give out with a cigaret commercial and “hmmm” that's a running joke on the show.
Like Phil Harris, Dennis Day and other Benny alumni, they’re taking the plunge on their own.
Two Singers
“Bob Crosby sings on the show and so does Dennis Day, so they don’t need us for regular songs,” explained Gurney Bell, Bill Days, Jay Meyer and Marty Sperzel—only not all at once.
“We’ll still stay with Benny, but we have our own transcribed radio show now so we can really sing songs.”
The hit they made as Benny’s foils have brought them a string of other sideline businesses, too.
The Sportsmen incorporated themselves and invested in a housing project, an oil well, a company in the Philippines, a helicopter and a play that flopped.
They’ve scored success on personal appearance tours, after a battle to convince booking agents they could do something besides a musical “hmmmm.” They also plan a series of television films.
“We went into these businesses together on our motto, ‘United we sing, divided we fall,’” quipped Days.
The “Hmm” on the Benny show started a joke.
“Don Wilson, the announcer, was to do the commercial and rather than make it a stereotyped thing, they decided to have a quartet do a hum. Then Benny could say, ‘For this I pay $500?’ and faint,” said Meyer.
Backing
The Sportsmen already were singing as “backing” for such name chirpers as Ginny Sims and Dinah Shore. The unknown quartet was hired for the Benny show. They were such a hit that Benny kept them on. On one program Benny threatened to sell them to rival Fred Allen, and CBS was flooded with irate letters defending the quartet.
One member of the combination has a pitchpipe to give the quartet their cue for the “Hmmm.”
“Once we missed the note, so on the next show Benny locked us in the closet and made us say the commercial 500 times,” grinned Sperzel.

Sperzel’s reference is well-known to fans of the Benny radio show. The broadcast of January 8, 1950 was a complete shambles—except to the audience, who love the spontaneity of mistakes. It started when award-winning announcer Don Wilson spoonerised columnist Drew Pearson’s name into “Drear Pooson.” The sketch which took up the second half of the show had Mary bollix a line. And then the Sportsmen missed a singing cue, with only a couple of them (sounding off-mike) delivering their lyrics. The following weeks, Jack used it as a running gag which Sperzel explained the interview.

For whatever reason, Sperzel became less talkative years later. Non-talkative is, perhaps, a better term. He flatly told people he didn’t want to talk about his career. He died in 2011 at 98, the last surviving member of the post-1943 version of the Quartet.

Really, I'm Not Cheap. Really.

One of the things that really bothered Jack Benny was that people might really think he was a cheapskate. Why it would bother him, I don’t know. If they thought he was cheap, so what? Well, that wasn’t Jack’s attitude, so he went out of his way—on pretty much an individual basis—to prove he wasn’t tight with a nickel. Then he got resentful about it.

Jack mentioned it in several interviews, but he’s a good example from 1952.

‘Stinginess’ Costs $5000 A Year, Jack Benny Wails
By ALINE MOSBY
United Press Hollywood Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD, Sept. 29 — That stingy character which Jack Benny plays on the radio and TV is costing him $5,000 a year, the comedian sighed today.
For 16 years the amiable Benny has portrayed a tightwad who takes in laundry, pays his valet a starvation salary and hoards cash in a basement vault surrounded by a moat, alligators, three doors and an aged gatewatcher.
By now, he says, some people believe the legend. So to counteract this catastrophe, Benny has turned into in big spender in real life. “I always have to tip as much or more than the next guy,” he said, “I donate more to organizations than I otherwise would. So my expenses are bigger than they should be because of those heavy tips.
“I've done this stingy character so long I guess maybe some people think I really am a little bit cheap.
“You know,” he added, “It's funny, but even the people who work with me tip more, too.”
Once Benny gave a dollar to a hat-check girl in a local nightclub.
“She gave it back and said, ‘Please leave me some illusion’,” he chuckled.
Benny added after a minute, “You better add that I still made her take that dollar.”
Taxi-drivers, especially in New York, kid him about his spend-thrift thrift character. He has to tip them extra-well. Once he was in a hurry to get to his radio show in New York and ran off, forgetting to pay the driver. The cabbie shouted “So it's true what they say about you!”
The comedian figures his program is such a mixture of fiction and fact (Mary Livingstone really did work in that department store) that listeners have trouble dividing the two. Once he received a letter from a Cleveland attorney berating him for not paying enough salary to Rochester, the valet on the show.
On Benny’s recent personal appearance tour around Europe that first question the London reporters popped was, “Are you really mean?” Jack was puzzled until somebody explained that in England “mean” means “stingy.”
In Holland, the queen's husband, told him with a wink, “Why don't you stay at the Palace Hotel? The price is right!”
Recently Benny handed a parking lot attendant $1 to cover a 50-cent charge. The lad pocketed the bill.
“With my reputation,” said Benny firmly, “I didn’t dare ask for the change.”

A Hollywood Kid Christmas

What did you get for Christmas? A toy horse for just under $200 perhaps?

Well, you might have if this was 1952. And you were the child of a Hollywood star.

It’d be really trite to say Christmas is a time for children. Because it’s not. Christmas has a little something for everyone, though I’m not really a Christmas person. But I don’t need to tell you how you felt about Christmas as a child. After all, you were there.

And children of the stars no doubt felt the same way. It’s just that their parents could afford more expensive gifts, though a child’s fun can’t be measured in dollars and cents.

Here’s Aline Mosby with our final dig through the archives of old newsprint, revealing what kids of Hollywood’s celebrities got for Christmas 60 years ago. To your right you see a photo from 1949 of the toy store mentioned in the article owned by Bernie Sher. It was at 309 North Rodeo Drive and was noted for having a tree that dispensed free lemonade. There’s a Christian Dior store at the address now. We doubt it has a lemonade tree.

Movie Queens Get Minks, Small Fry Also Score
By ALINE MOSBY
United Press Hollywood Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 25 (UP) — Many a movie queen found cellophane-wrapped mink coats under their Christmas trees, but the small fry of Hollywood got just as fabulous presents.
Movietown moppets this morning tore the wrappings off such glamorous gifts as junior size four-poster beds and a huge toy lion who blinks his eyes and yawns, or roars, depending on your sound effects.
Jungle Feline
Eve Arden’s offspring got the jungle feline from Uncle Bernie’s fancy top shop in Beverly Hills. Uncle Bernie also delivered a big bear, four feet high on all fours, to the children of radio-TV star Ralph Edwards.
“But our biggest sellers were space helmets that you can see out of but not into,” chuckled Uncle Bernie.
Maureen O’Sullivan’s seven children unwrapped seven of those, as did the small fry of Jane Wyman, Jerry Lewis and Red Skelton. Mrs. Skelton also purchased a space helmet for her biggest “child,” Skelton himself. Skelton, who recently had a major operation, opened his gilt in the hospital.
Suit of Armor
A suit of armor, just like in “Ivanhoe,” now adorns Charles Beyer’s child. Gloria de Haven’s little girl whirled about in a grown-upish ballet costume this morning, while the blonde actress gave her boy a frontier gun.
Other lucky children got a five-foot gorilla, at $260; horses, at $195, and playhouses, at $199, from Uncle Bernie’s. One society belle bought a $29.25 tiny four-poster bed — as a Christmas present for her cat.
The “Enchanted Cottage” children’s shop, run by ex-movie queen Gail Patrick, sold lunch boxes to Laraine Day for her children. Ex-football hero Tom Harmon and wife, Elyse Knox, gifted their boy with a bathrobe printed with the colors and number of Harmon’s football suit at Michigan.
Space Patrol Outfit
Dorothy Lamour's son got a space patrol outfit; Joan Crawford’s twin girls found painting smocks and paints in their Christmas stockings, and Lana Turner’s daughter unwrapped a be-jeweled party sweater just like mama’s.
The grownups got quite a haul today, too. Jane Wyman’s new husband gave her a $15,000 mink coat from designer Don Loper’s shop. Loper also sent a cellophane-wrapped white ermine cape and black broadcloth coat to June Allyson, gifts from husband Dick Powell.
“It’s the Republican election. I think,” shrugged Loper. “Spending was quite heavy this year.”
The most luxurious gift was claimed by Jeanne Crain. Producer Len Goldstein gave her a jewelled fly sweater after she complained about the insects on her movie set.

Ho-Ho-Ho-Hollywood

This is the time of year they really put the tinsel in Tinseltown.

There’s been an accusation going around for years that nothing in Hollywood is real. Christmas-time is ample proof, though the reason is more meteorological than cinematographical. Thus the wintery weather in the movie capital is no Miracle on 34th Street. It’s as crafted as any big-budget blockbuster sequel.

United Press columnist Aline Mosby looked how some of the stars of 60 years ago got their neighbourhoods into the Christmas spirit—and appearance. This is from newspapers of December 24, 1952.

Even Hollywood Manages To Look Christmas-like
By ALINE MOSBY
(United Press Hollywood Correspondent)
HOLLYWOOD (UP)—The orange is on the tree and the blonde in the swimming pool, but this land of cactus and sunshine manages to look like the good old North come Christmas, anyway.
It snows about half an inch every 27 years around here. Yet the movie stars and other citizens load their streets and homes with plastic reindeer and snow just as though everybody knew what it was all about.
Comedian Danny Thomas each year puts up a $1000 nativity scene on his front lawn among the palm trees and rose bushes in Beverly Hills.
Fancy Santa.
The sun also beats down on a mammoth $5000 Santa who’s climbing down comic Bud Abbott's chimney in the San Fernando Valley. This Santa waves his arms and shouts “Merry Christmas” via a phonograph. Abbott’s thrifty neighbor across the street merely puts up a sign on his lawn saying, “See our display,” with an arrow pointing toward the Abbott abode.
Glamour girls like Peggy Lee hang sequin-sprinkled artificial snowballs on their Christmas trees. Other stars, including Ruth Hussey, sprinkle fake snow on the real trees out in front. Esther Williams strung lights on a sycamore tree that forms an arch over her front door. One studio art director deco-rated his Christmas tree with ermine tails.
The Boulevard.
The lamp posts on Hollywood Boulevard sag with three-ton, eight-foot metal Christmas trees. Each is ablaze with 150 colored lights. Overhead dangle 300 aluminum six-foot bells and four-foot stars. The total effect is $125,000 worth of colored spots before your eyes.
Every night Santa Claus, who the rest of the year wears yellow shirts and grows lemons, rides down the boulevard. Bleached snowflakes, known as snow out here, flies from the glittering sleigh.
When Hollywood’s Santa Claus lane parade was launched in 1927 Santa’s sleigh was pulled by a camel to match the climate. The beast got tired and sat down half way down the street.
Neighboring Beverly Hills hung red bells on the lamp posts. A huge Santa, sleigh and six of the world’s largest (this is California) reindeer ride overhead. Wilshire boulevard features metal trees that bleat Christmas carols.
Roy Rogers plays Santa in North Hollywood’s parade. Christmas day, though, many celebrities will head to even warmer Palm Springs, where decorations on the thorny Joshua trees light up the sand.
One nearby town has a huge neon “Merry Christmas” on the hillside.
Not even Hollywood thought of that.

Tomorrow: Christmas cards of the stars.

Tintair For Stanwyck

Last Yuletide season, we brought you a daily edition of Christmas With the Stars, thanks to old newspaper columns by Bob Thomas of the Associated Press. This season, we’ll check in with the other major wire service.

Aline Mosby of the United Press was more than a Hollywood gossip. After working the show biz beat, she covered a polar opposite—the Cold War as the wire service’s bureau chief in Moscow. One of her interview subjects there was one Lee Harvey Oswald. In the early ‘80s, she reported from what we called Peking back then.

But times were fluffier for her in 1952, when she published one of those celebrity Christmas lists that fills newspapers (and, today, web sites). She didn’t compile it herself. She had it done by Arthur Blake.

Some of Blake’s references are as dated as Blake himself. To be honest, I’d never heard of him. When I think of impressionists of the 1950s, I think of Will Jordan. But while Ed Sullivan was Will’s most famous impersonation, Mrs. Ed Sullivan might have been more Blake’s style. Sure, he could go on stage and make off like Peter Lorre and Jimmy Stewart, but he was known more for Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Mae West and Carmen Miranda.

Blake provides Ms. Mosby with not one but two Christine Jorgensen jokes. Franchot Tone divorced Barbara Payton in 1952 after learning she was still fooling around with another actor with whom he lost a very violent fight. At the time of this column, Ginger Rogers was about to marry Jacques Bergerac, who was 16 years younger. The “skinny” Sinatra jokes of the ‘40s were pretty much passé by this time. And Scott Brady may have been happy to have been noticed a couple of decades later; his star fell so far he ended up in the cult favourite Satan’s Sadists (with another big Technicolor name of the ‘50s, Russ Tamblyn).

Blake’s cattiness here seems pretty lame (certainly by today’s standards) but he annoyed some of his victims way-back-when. His nightclub act featured a deadly Louella Parsons routine which insulted her so much, she wouldn’t appear on Eddie Cantor’s radio show with him.

The Caustic Arthur Blake Turns Soft for Christmas
By ALINE MOSBY
United Press Hollywood Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD (UP)—Mimic Arthur Blake, who tickles night club audiences with caustic imitations of movie stars, decided to soften the blow today with “Christmas presents” for them all.
These gifts, of course, never will reach Santa’s knapsack. But Blake hopes to slip each present into his night club act when the celebrities show up in person.
While examining a fingernail, Blake lists his gifts as follows:
“For Barbara Payton—A unlimited extension of her travel visa.
“Bette Davis—Ten thousand cartons of di-nicotined cigarettes.
“Gary Cooper—Pocket size digest of the art of conversation.
“Mickey Rooney—A safe and sane fourth (marriage).
“Marlon Brando—An un-torn T-shirt.
“Percy Kilbride—Scott Brady’s looks.
“Scott Brady—Percy Kilbride’s money.
“Ava Gardner— A diet for fattening up Frankie.
“Marilyn Monroe—A new lease on her 1953 calendar.
“Tallulah Bankhead— A box of soothing throat lozenges.
“Christine Jorgensen—A Christmas note beginning dear sir, or dear madam, as the case may be.
“Alan Ladd—Another expression.
“Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson—-Haircuts.
“Ritz Brothers—A trip to Denmark so they can come back the Andrews Sisters.
“Garbo — A comeback, gift wrapped.
“Barbara Stanwyck—Tintair, in the large economy size.
“Ginger Rogers—A boy friend her own age.
“Franchot Tone—Judo lessons.
“Bob Hope—Bing Crosby enterprises.
“Ingrid Bergman — An Italian cookbook.
“Marjorie Main— A date with Charles of the Ritz.
"Tyrone Power—A gold coffin for his play, ‘John Brown’s Body.’”
Blake has no fear what his celebrated customers will say at such “gifts.” “Oh, they never REALLY get mad,” he shrugged.

Tomorrow: How stars of the ‘50s decorate for Christmas.

39 Again?

When Jack Benny died in 1974, newspapers quietly joked in their obituaries that he was 39. It seems that Benny was always 39 but despite an Associated Press story in 1950 that it had been a joke of his for years, it wasn’t. Benny didn’t turn 39 on the radio until 1948. And he decided 39 was a funny number—and the vanity of it fit his character—that he stayed there. He played it up. Other radio shows played it up. As you can see, the AP even did a straight news story about it (newspapers ran it on their front page, too).

Pretty soon, the newspaper columnists realised a Jack Benny “39” birthday feature story was an easy one to do every February. Let’s give you a few. The first ones appeared in 1954, and this is one of them that year.

Jack Benny Still Calls It ‘Only 40’ But He’s Actually 60 Valentine Day
By JAMES BACON
ASSOCIATED PRESS STAFF WRITER
HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 13. — Tomorrow is not only Valentine’s Day, It is a notable milestone for Jack Benny. He will be 60 years old.
This man, who’s been 39 long enough for a whole generation of babies to grow old enough to vote, occupies a special, sort of niche. In years in show business, he has made few enemies. May be none.
This week Benny announces be will now be 40.
Hollywood is a place where a nasty story flies faster than jet ace Chuck Yeager. But you don’t hear any about Benny.
There may be a reason. Benny rarely kids anyone else; he’s too busy kidding himself. He’s made a fortune out of being the butt of his own jokes. That makes it hard for anyone else to get mad at him.
The Benny fountain of youth is just one of many myths that the wag of Waukegan likes to perpetuate about himself. Take his reputation for stinginess.
ANYONE WHO KNOWS will tell you that Benny is one of the most generous men in town. He is a perpetual gift giver, widely known for his charitable work. Yet, while many a star sends along press agents with each contribution, Benny prefers secrecy.
Eddie Cantor tells of the time he invited Jack to his home for dinner. During the course of the dinner, Cantor, an active worker for the cause, told Jack of a bonds for Israel drive.
“I could see Jack was interested,” Cantor recalls, “but he floored me when he wrote out check for $25,000.”
Cantor adds:
“The only reference I ever heard him make about it was once when he told a mutual friend: ‘Don’t ever eat at Cantor’s house. He serves the most expensive meals in town’.”
ANOTHER BENNY myth is his lack of violin skill.
To this day, the fiddle is his great love, except for his wife and daughter. Successful as he is as a comic, he occasionally broods over what might have happened had he practiced the violin more as a child. At the turn of the century, Waukegan, Ill., knew Benny as a child prodigy. Even in grammar school, he was good enough to play in the pit orchestra of the local vaudeville house.
Some weeks ago, he convulsed a swank filmland gathering as master of ceremonies.
After the banquet, most of the big shot guests left. Those who stayed for the dancing got a real treat. They saw happy Benny playing a jazzy violin in the orchestra.
ANOTHER FAVORITE Benny myth is his constant reference to his toupee — always good for a laugh. Jack has a good head of hair and needs a toupee like Liberace.
Benny made one of the great movie stinkers of all time a few years back, "The Horn Blows at Midnight.” He says frankly “It just plain stunk.” But he’s made it a sure-fire, laugh-getting gag for years. Recently, with a rewritten script, he played the role on TV in Ominbus, and it came off well.
Benny admits that offstage he is the most unfunny of top comedians. Laughmaking to him is a serious business. But other comics love him, because when he laughs it’s because something is funny. George Burns is probably his favorite. He has called Burns “the comedian's comedian.”
Once Burns called Jack in London. The call from Beverly Hills came through clear as a bell.
“I just called to say hello, Jack,” said George. “So hello.” Bang went the receiver.
BENNY TALKED about this gag for a year. Then Burns and Allen played the Palladium in London. Benny flew all the way to London. George and Gracie were attending a party. Benny got on a phone in the next room.
He had Jane Wyman imitate an English operator saying “Beverly Hills calling Mr. Burns.”
Jack, on the other end, said: “Hello, George, sorry I can’t be there” and slammed down the receiver. Burns thought the gag was terrific. Then Benny slipped into the room to make it even funnier.
One running gag on the Benny show concerns Mary Livingstone’s job behind the hosiery counter at the May Company. That's no myth. She actually was working there when she and Jack started getting serious about each other.
They have been married 27 years and she has been an important part of the act almost that long. A job with Benny amounts to a lifetime career. Don Wilson has been with him 20 years, Eddie (Rochester) Anderson 17 and Dennis Day better than 15.
OF KENNY BAKER, once the radio show’s top singer, Benny says: “I guess he got a few laughs and thought he could do better on his own. I didn’t know he wanted to leave until he left. He could be working for me today.” Today Benny says he doesn’t know where Baker is now.
Even his writers have been with him 11 years. That probably qualifies as a Hollywood record for the most expendable of local careers.
Benny was one of the first comedians to play straight for the other people in the cast. It has been said that Benny can get more laughs out of a simple “Hmmmmm” than most comics get from a sock joke.
“Yes,” agrees Benny, “but don’t forget that a lot went before that ‘Hmmmm’ to make it sound funny at that time.”

Now from February 14, 1955.

Jack Benny, 39, Promises He’ll Be 40 Next Year
BY ALINE MOSBY
HOLLYWOOD — (U.P.) — Jack Benny celebrated another 39th birthday today but next year, he promised, he’ll be 40.
For 11 years, Benny has been 39 on his radio and TV shows, a running gag that has turned the veteran comedian’s age into a national institution.
Actually, Benny is 61 on this Valentine’s day. In 1956 he will reluctantly add another year to the only age he’ll admit on his programs.
“I considered becoming 40 this year but my birthday was too far away from my show. Next year it will be closer so we can make a national event out of it,” said Benny, a smart showman even when it comes to birthdays.
“By the time I’m 43 on my show I won’t be able to work,” he smiled.
Believable Age Gag
Benny was sitting in Romanoff’s, an upholstered eatery where you often can see celebrities plowing into $6 lunches. But even in Hollywood the fancy restaurants have home town touches. Between courses Benny exchanged notes, dispatched by a patient headwaiter, with a diner on the other side of the room, Humphrey Bogart.
I thought Bogie’s notes were funnier. But, then Benny is the first to admit he surrounds himself with the best of TV-radio writers.
“People say I could just stand on the stage and be funny,” said Benny. “I’ve been in the business a long time. I know better. You have to have material. And it must have a fairly believable premise.”
Introduced Gag In ‘41
The age gag, believable because Benny doesn’t look his years, was introduced into his show in 1943. Benny then was supposed to be 36. The following year he became 37 but five years ago stopped at 39, and has vigorously resisted turning 40 ever since.
The joke is so well known now that when Arthur Godfrey recently asked a TV contestant his age, the audience howled when the man answered, “39.” Even Benny’s show business colleagues are mesmerized by the gag.
“You should see some of the movie scripts I get,” said Benny, “I’d have to be 39 to play them. Recently I was offered the role of a baseball pitcher! And they wanted me to do ‘Seven Year Itch’ on the stage. They don’t think I get any older.
Formula for Youth
“This may be because radio and TV are like a comic strip. You hear the same voice, see the same face. Entertainers don’t grow or sound older to people.”
Benny has a simple formula for keeping his youthful looks: Diet and stay in show business.
“In this business you keep looking young,” said Benny, who has the relaxed, healthy air of a big success (he is No. 1 on radio and in TV’s top 10).
“You work all the time and are always around young people. Why, when I walk on the stage I feel as I did when I walked on 30 years ago,” he said, and sauntered off to go to a golf course.

Ms. Mosby took a couple of birthdays off. Here’s her last one from February 13, 1957. Mosby left United Press to do public relations and freelance reporting from The Brussells Exhibition, then returned to the wire service to report from Moscow.

Actor Jack Benny, 63, Is 39 Again Thursday—Keeping Legend Straight
By ALINE MOSBY
* * *
HOLLYWOOD (UP) — Jack Benny celebrates his 39th birthday again Thursday — because staying 39, he said today, “keeps me young.”
The comedian who has won more continued success on radio and TV than any other entertainer actually will be 63 on Valentine’s Day. But to his millions of fans, and Benny himself, he’s still 39—a happy legend he began on his radio show back in 1945.
“People should forget birthdays and their age,” reflected Benny as he sat in his Beverly Hills office on the eve of the occasion.
“If it weren’t for observing birthdays, you couldn’t keep track of your age. It would be wonderful if a person couldn't. Some people feel old just because of those numbers that are pinned to him.
He Feels 39
“You don’t look older to people who see you all the time. I really feel 39—just as I forgot my right name as soon as I changed it to Jack Benny. I do the 39 gag so much on my show that I don’t picture myself as much older.”
Benny first used the age gag in 1945 on radio when he announced he was 36. He was 37 for a couple of years and finally moved to 39 where he stayed. Since then the age joke—along with gags about his Maxwell car and his gold-filled vault—has become a national legend. Once a Texas newspaper headlined, “Temperature Hits Jack Benny Age—39.”
The gentle, amiable comedian realized the importance of his 39 pose two years ago when he planned to turn 40 on his CBS-TV show. It was to be a national event, an hour program bringing together all the entertainers who have worked with him, from Frank Parker to Phil Harris.
But a Boston newspaper talked Jack out of it.
Gag Helps Others
“Someone sent me an editorial they printed," said Jack, parking his feet on top of his desk. “It begged me not to grow older.
"Their reasoning was that it has been a great help to a lot of people who now can figure that when they get to be 39 they won’t get any older, either. And so they don’t get older.
"I usually don't heed critics.
This was the first time I ever listened to a newspaper. We cancelled the show and I’m still 39.”
Each year Jack receives thousands of birthday cards, many marked 39. Fans also send gifts, such as a model of an old Max well that sits on his desk. He also is proud of such presents as a 1955 Pennsylvania license plate, “JB 39,” and old hub caps from Maxwells.
This year Jack will be given his biggest birthday party in his life. He’ll be feted by the top stars of show business Thursday night at a $100-a-plate dinner with proceeds going to the American Heart Fund.

Finally, Jack gave some tips in the February 19, 1954 edition of Collier’s on how to avoid becoming 40. He got a promo piece from the United Press. There’s no byline on this one.

Jack Benny 39?
NEW YORK, Feb 4. (UP)—Jack Benny made an announcement today. He’s going to be “40.”
The comedian, who has been 85 —or younger — since your old crystal set, told how he discovered and got used to the difficult idea in an article for a popular magazine.
“Today I face the future fearlessly,” Benny wrote, “convinced that, after 39 years of the best fruits of life, my next 39 years will be just as fruitful—and will last just as long.”
In passing, Benny passed on some hints for avoiding 40.
Benny listed them this way:
“1. Before your 40th birthday keep circulating the story that you’re 39. If people hear it often enough they'll believe it for years.
“2. When in the company of younger people, ask their advice on everything. Pretty soon they’ll begin to believe they’re older than you are.
“3. Stay slim, thin people always look younger. Connie Mack is 92, but he's so slender nobody figures him to be more than 88.
“4. If you have to spend any money, do it grudgingly. People will think you’re saving up for your old age instead of entering it. This rule won't cost you anything except a few friends, but you’ll have so much money you’d be ducking them anyway.
“5. Avoid reminiscing about the past. If the name Lincoln should come up in your conversation, be sure that it's the car you’re talking about and not the President.”
P.S. Who’s Who says Benny was born Feb. 14, 1894, in Waukegan, Ill.

We don’t have “a million of ‘em” as the great Jimmy Durante once said, but we do have a few more birthday columns from the 1950s that we’ll post some other time.

Lew Who?

Fans of old-time cartoons know who Warren Foster, Mike Maltese and Tedd Pierce are. They came up with some of the funniest cartoons ever made.

They’re the writers that people associate most with the Warner Bros. studio. There were others, of course, if a fan was pressed to name them. Bill Scott and Lloyd Turner went on to bigger fame with Jay Ward and sitcoms respectively. Bugs Hardaway’s name was tagged on to a certain rabbit. But the name of one writer probably doesn’t come immediately to mind.

Lew Landsman received one lonely screen credit. He wrote “Porky at the Crocadero,” released in 1938.

That begs the question—why? Why only one? Was that his only cartoon? What happened to him? And who is Lew Landsman anyway?

I’m afraid most of those questions may never be answered. Too much time has passed. But a little jaunt around the internet has produced a bit of information about him, though hardly the full story.

Landsman could be best described as a parody artist. He sold comic drawings to magazines but then took it a little further. His work was so good he had a number of showings in the 1940s and ‘50s in the Los Angeles area. One close to April Fool’s Day in 1948 attracted a lot of media coverage. It displayed his parody impressions of movie and radio artists. He drew Ed Gardner, Archie of “Duffy’s Tavern,” as a phone with a hat answering itself (the radio show always opened with Archie answering the phone). “What happens on my canvas shouldn’t happen to Picasso. It never did, either,” he joked to the Los Angeles Times.

Here’s the United Press story about the exhibit.

Screwball Artist Prepares New Show Ribbing Filmites
By ALINE MOSBY
HOLLYWOOD, Mar. 31—(UP) — Folks who dilate their nostrils when a “modern” artist changed a carrot to a glob of paint don’t know the half of it. Wait’ll they see what a guy here is doing to “portraits” of movie stars!
This character is busy at home daubing oil on canvas. He chuckles fiendishly. He says his portraits will cause numerous crises in Hollywood.
In a couple of months, Artist Lew Landsman will hang his pictures in the ultra-modern Hall of Art in Beverly Hills. Then he’ll sit back to await the repercussions.
* * *
THE MOVIE people will rush over figuring he’s painted their likenesses from glammer photos. Most of the stars will snicker, he hopes. Some might not.
Lana Turner, for instance, will nearly pop her big, blue eyes out at the picture we saw that Landsman painted of her. It’s a candle brightly burning at both ends.
The painting of George Raft we could tell without the label. It shows a guy with big feet and a pin-striped suit His head consists of a huge hand which is flipping a coin. That trick made Raft famous in “Scarface.”
Garry Moore turned out to be a big question mark with crew-cut topknot standing before a microphone But take a peek at the painting of Frank Sinatra. He’s just a microphone, with bow tie and curly hair.
* * *
RAY MILLAND wishes people would forget that bottle-on-the chandelier stuff from “The Lost Week-End.” It’s doubtful they will now. Artist Landsman painted Ray as a big eye peering over the edge of a ceiling fixture.
It’s easy to guess which picture is Harpo Marx. A fuzzy-topped character with a huge harp for lips and teeth. Humphrey Bogart’s is even nuttier. He’s just a canvas with four bullet holes in it.
This won't be the first time Lew has stuck a wacky finger in art and stirred rapidly. He has some other paintings hung in the Hall of Art now that turned Hollywood on its ear.
* * *
LEW USED TO BE a magazine cartoonist with a subtle sense of humor. Then an artist friend suggested he turn real artist because everybody else was. Landsman daubed up a stack of canvasses and took ‘em to the Hall of Art.
This institution, being brave and new, gave him an exhibition. They called it “Landsmania.” The place drew record-cracking crowds. The customers roared. Even the art critics snickered.
“The Spike Jones of Art;” “The Poor Man’s Dali,” they called him. One horrified writer, tho, said Landsman’s paintings “shouldn't happen to a critic. They're like those little guys in the corners of a Smokey Stover comic strip only bigger."

Lewis Landsman was born in New York City on November 19, 1901; his parents were Hungarian. He was still living there in 1930, and married to his wife Elsa, who was Hungarian as well. We first find him in Los Angeles in the 1936 City Directory. The 1939 directory (which mentions both of them with information likely compiled the previous year) lists his occupation as “artist,” but the 1942 edition reveals he is a salesman for the Kater Engraving Company, a block from Jimmy Durante’s home. Unfortunately, he can’t be found in the 1940 U.S. Census. Perhaps not coincidentally, Warners animator Virgil Ross is in the census at Landsman’s address in the 1939 Los Angeles phone book. It’s the only other connection I’ve found between him and the studio. How he got hired and why he left, I don’t know.

There’s little else I’ve been able to find about him. He illustrated a parody version of the Sears catalogue, published in Los Angeles in 1962. And don’t believe any of those make-up-history sites on the internet that claim Landsman wrote a “Scrappy’s Trip to Mars” (1938) for Columbia. The U.S. Government Copyright Catalogue states the writer was Allen Rose.

The self-proclaimed “Poor Man’s Dali” died in Los Angeles on April 4, 1977.

Late note:To add to the confusion, a Louis Landsman, listed as "painter, picture studio" can be found in the 1940 Census at 5722 Harold Way, Los Angeles. However and his wife Rose are Russian, and he was born in 1888 or 1889. Both Landsmans have listings in the 1939 Directory.

June Foray

There might be a debate over who is the best cartoon voice actress of all time, but I’ll bet you there would be almost unanimous, universal consent over who is the most beloved.

Can it be anyone else but June Foray?

I have decided, for no particular reason other than I love her work, to declare this June Foray Day on the Tralfaz and Yowp blogs. You’ll be able to read old newspaper clippings about June on both, stories written before she was tipsy-fied by Jay Ward and Bill Scott into accepting what’s probably her most popular role as Rocket J. Squirrel in 1959.



Newspapers before 1950 mentioned June on rare occasion, generally in radio listings for a show called “Smile Time.” It was a daily, 15-minute comedy broadcast that debuted December 31, 1945 on the Mutual network and starred Steve Allen and Wendell Noble. Soon after the show started, one radio column noted (no doubt assisted by a network handout):

June Foray, star of “Smile Time”, can do most anything with her vocal chords—she has been the parrot in Spike Jones’ “Chloe”, the hiccup of Paulette Goddard and Veronica Lake, and can imitate every animal sound imaginable.

Earlier in the year, one newspaper noted her role on “A Man Called Jordan” as “an exotic German spy” (Hmmm. Shades of Natasha?) and as a 13-year-old Arab boy. And, the following year, she was hired to play a pain-in-the-butt tenant of Stu Erwin in the long-forgotten “Phone Again Finnegan” on CBS radio.

Like almost everyone else in radio, June made the jump to television. Oddly enough,
Steve Allen didn’t use her on his television show; maybe it was due to the late hours. June did appear on an early Johnny Carson show (April 20, 1953) based in Los Angeles. The big-name guest was Fred Allen.

Syndicated columnist Al Morton had this cute little biography of June on August 6, 1953. The reference to little old ladies is interesting, given her later career at Warners.

One of the most surprising voices in show business belongs to a pint-sized, throaty girl who says she always wanted to be a leading lady but ended up a character.
She’s June Foray, who can deliver any one of a thousand voices, human or animal, at the drop of a cue. She’ll be exhibiting her vocal talents over ABC-TV on Saturday, Aug. 22, when “Smilin’ Ed’s Gang” makes its debut.
Her own description of her unusual talent range is “anything that walks or crawls.” It all started when June was six. Her mother thought her voice was too low and marched her off to a dramatic school to “elevate her sounds to a more ladylike pitch.” This instigated, instead, such an interest in the theater that June is still with it.
Throughout her schooling, June did summer stock. By the time she reached her early teens, she has tried every role from the town moppet to Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth—with a specialty of being very good in portraying “little old ladies.”
June has done voices for many cartoons and juvenile record albums. She was a cat in Walt Disney’s “Cinderella,” and imitated two mermaids and an old squaw in “Peter Pan.”
June, dark-eyed, size eight and four feet 11 inches tall, is an apartment dweller whose favorite companion is Katrina, a two-year-old Daschshund. June says Katrina has a fairly man-sized bark, but not “half as good as mine.”
Incidentally, one of her favorite pastimes is barking at the neighborhood dogs before she leaves home in the mornings. More than once she has had the whole canine' populace of her block in an uproar—not to mention the neighbors.

The United Press concentrated on her film work in this 1951 story.

VOICE SPECIALIST
Screams for Living
By ALINE MOSBY
HOLLYWOOD, March 26 (U.P.)— Tiny June Foray, who screams for a living, recommended screaming today for anybody desiring a sexy voice and a slim tummy.
Miss Foray, a “voice specialty” actress, is never seen on the screen. But when the celluloid heroine lets loose a blood-curdling yell, it’s often Miss Foray on the sound track, not the star.
By now, she says, she has “a very firm diaphragm.” Her own voice isn’t husky, but she says a certain kind of screaming can make anybody’s that way.
Lauren Bacall got her boudoir voice by screaming on orders from her discoverer, Howard Hawks.
“You can get a husky voice by screaming incorrectly, with your throat,” she explained. “You strain your throat muscles, what I call ‘stroking the glottis.’
“When I scream I keep an open throat and yell from the diaphragm. That’s good exercise for the stomach.”
Miss Foray has the job of making movies “shriller than ever” because, she said, movie stars are too embarrassed to.
“When a movie actress screams, out comes a little ‘eek.’ They never let loose, so their scream has to be redubbed on the sound track,” the pretty screamer said.
“I guess movie stars are afraid of straining their voices or embarrassed. You have to be be uninhibited to scream.”
June looks like she’d never got more than a whisper out of her pert four feet 11 inches. But she’s hollered on movie sound tracks for glamour queens like Paulette Goddard, Joan Caulfield and Veronica Lake.
She’s also sneezed for Constance Collier, made whooping cough noises for a boy in “Shepherd of the Hills,” sobbed for Olivia De Havilland’s baby in “To Each His Own,” and is now doing seven different children’s voices in Walt Disney’s “Peter Pan.”
On the radio she’s an actress who screams for herself. For NBC’s “Smilin’ Ed McConnell” children’s adventure program she plays everything from a space siren to a horrible witch to a cat, sometimes all on the same program.
“I use different types of screams to register fright, surprise, anger and pleasant surprise,” she said. “The hardest was for a movie, ‘Burma Surgeon.’ I screamed for one hour and got a headache.”

June helped in the war effort in Korea. The United Press wrote about her travails in a story for newspapers of December 16, 1954, revealing how a star’s life is different than ours’.

USO Troupers Head Overseas
By ALINE MOSBY
HOLLYWOOD — (U.P.) — Terry Moore and other stars get most of the glory when Army planes take off today and next week to overseas, but there is many an unsung heroine in the troupe.
At no pay, a loss in salary and considerable expense, singer June Foray, for example, had to do the following to get ready for the USO trek that brings Yuletide cheer to GIs far from home;
Take tetanus, typhoid, small pox, diphtheria and cholera shots; get a passport, do her Christmas shopping, mail Christmas cards, rehearse her act for two weeks with other members of the 71-performer troupe, do her regular work at Capitol Records, attend Army briefings, leave her cat at cat motel, make her costume, buy winter underwear, pay her bills, insure her fur coat, postpone work dates until she gets back in three weeks, make out a will, and get her hair bleached.
Typical of Most.
“But it’s worth it,” laughed June as she packed her suitcase before stepping on the plane en-route to Iceland, France and Germany.
“When the Army told us the boys appreciate our giving up our Christmas to entertain them, we felt kind of happy to do something good for them.”
June, a little-known singer and mimic who records cartoon voices for records and movies, is typical of most of the show people making the trip. She's a veteran of
10 years of “Tom and Jerry” movies, radio, TV and “Woody Woodpecker” records, and was asked by USO to work up a comedy-imitations act.
To Look Feminine.
The troupers get $10 a day expense money and their board and room, but, except for the union musicians, no salary. Terry, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Hope and other stars have received headlines for their trips to Army bases. But June and other troupers wade through snow, work two or three shows a day, travel by Jeep and get little sleep with no recognition.
“Forrest Tucker, the star of our group, won’t let us girls wear slacks,” June added. “He thinks the GIs will want us to look feminine.”
Disc Jockey Johnny Grant, another unsung hero of the USO troupe, left today on his seventh overseas trip to entertain homesick GIs at forgotten bases in the Orient.

Why did June get into voice acting in the first place? Let’s hear from her in her own words, written in the Pasadena Independent of July 9, 1959.

Girl Behind Voice Likes Her Calling
By JUNE FORAY
A small number of people in Hollywood earn their living in what amounts to a really offbeat fashion. I’m one of them.
I specialize in imitating all sorts of voices for TV and radio commercials, motion picture cartoons and sometimes for big-name stars whose dialogue, for some reason or other, did not record well. My voice is heard by millions of people daily and to them I’m more vocal than visual as I seldom appear before the cameras.
From time to time, I have been seen on the Jack Benny and other television shows, but principally my work is confined to doing all types of voices—from babies to witches and then some.
Why have I specialized in this field? Well, for one reason I’m rather short to play leading roles. And another is that I have developed an ability to imitate all sorts of people am in this area, there isn’t as much competition as in the straight acting field. Economically, too, it has its rewards and I’m frank to admit that money is always desirable when you earn it by delivering an effective and conscientious job.
My voice has been heard, impersonating all sorts of characters, on such cartoons as
“Woody Woodpecker,” and “Bugs Bunny.”
I have worked with the great Stan Freberg on practically all of his records and radio shows. A lot of people remember “St. George and the Dragonette” for example and, more recently, the “Best of Freberg,” album.
I’m practically a voice detached from a body, but I love my work—and its financial rewards. And another good angle is the fact that in the far distant future, I won't have to worry about my appearance—only my voice which, from all indications, is holding up well despite its constant use, professionally, that is.
I dare you to turn on your radio or TV set without hearing me.

These days, perhaps you can find her on TV constantly, but you can on video-sharing web sites with endless cartoons. Let’s end our June Foray Day post with a fan-made video of a few of June’s most famous animated roles.

Past Paarticiple

Jack Paar was a whiner.

I’m not referring to how he walked out on his late night TV audience because NBC censored his joke about a water closet. I’m not referring to his spat with Ed Sullivan, where he called Mr. Toast of the Town “a liar.” No, I’m going back even further.

Paar came out of the Army and was handed a network radio career by Jack Benny, who saw him overseas. But in almost every newspaper column I can find from his radio days (his first TV appearance was in 1951), he’s complaining about something. He’s complaining about poor Jack Paar and how everyone’s doing him wrong.

Want an example? Here’s one from the United Press from 1950 where he, basically, says his audience is stupid.

Comic Jack Paar Returns to Radio
With Lower I. Q., Down to Earth Gags
BY ALINE MOSBY
HOLLYWOOD, July 26.—(UP)—Comic Jack Paar confessed today he was a flop in Hollywood until he lowered his I. Q. and didn’t go in for “intelligent” gags any more.
Paar, once heralded as the funniest guy in show business, is back on the radio after two years of being “broke and hungry.”
He hadn't had a pay check since he left R. K. O. where he sat for three years, with pay, doing practically nothing. And he hadn’t had a radio job since he made a hit with the critics as a summer replacement for Jack Benny’s show three years ago.
+ + +
“I’VE STOPPED trying to make people think while they laugh,” he explained. “I’ve quit being clever or new.
“People don’t want new gags. You can’t change show business. They want to hear the same old thing. They feel inferior if you make them think too much. If you give them something different they say it’s corny.
“Before, I was cold and satirical. Now, on the radio I talk about my baby, and they die laughing.”
Paar originally was discovered when, as a buck private entertainer, he verbally ripped Army brass with insults other GIs just thought about. After the war R. K. O. signed him before he got his Army boots off. Then he sat home and cashed a pay check every week for doing nothing.
“THEY WOULDN’T even let me park my car inside the studio,” he complained.
Once he was so sure the studio was going to drop him he insulted top movie brass at a studio party.
“I said the publicity chief ran a forest lawn with typewriters,” he said.
Dore Schary, then R. K. O. production chief, thought Paar was so funny he signed him up for another year.
Paar finally got in a movie, “Weep No More,” which he says is awful. He also landed the plum job of subbing for Benny.
He won every show business magazine award that year as the best comic on the air.
“Those awards were the kiss of death. I never worked again,” he said. “My wife’s family is well-to-do and they kept us going, or we wouldn’t have eaten.”
He finally got a foot back in the door and replaced Eddie Cantor on NBC’s “Take It or Leave It.”
“I discovered what the critics like isn’t what the people like,” he said. “I’ve stopped acting intelligent.”

An example of his “intelligent” humour? Well, one joke involved him looking at a photo of Paulette Goddard in a brief evening gown, then remarking “It that dress were a book it would be banned in Boston.”

It seems strange that someone like Jack Benny would hand his top-rated show to someone like Paar, but that’s what happened on June 1, 1947. Benny had his cast insult him. Paar insulted everybody but Paar. Sure, Don Rickles has insulted people for years. But he always made it known he wasn’t serious. That isn’t the impression one gets from Paar. Here’s a column from a couple of weeks after he debuted on the Benny show.

By Erskine Johnson
NEA Staff Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD, June 17—Hollywood’s newest comedy sensation, Jack Paar, landed in the movies because, as a GI entertainer during the war, he insulted army brass hats from one end of the Pacific to the other.
To a base command officer: “The only way you'll ever get the purple heart is if you get caught between two desks coming together.”
The tens of thousands of men Jack entertained in the Pacific will be happy to hear that he is now insulting the brass hats in Hollywood.
To Producer Sid Rogell: “I just saw a trailer of your latest picture. If you haven’t made it, don’t.”
But the Pacific veterans will be unhappy to hear that Hollywood hasn’t figured out what to do with Jack Paar. Sure, he’s a hit on the radio now as Jack Benny’s summer replacement.
“I’ve got enough money to last for the rest of my life. If I commit suicide at noon tomorrow.”
But after eight months under contract to R-K-O, Jack Paar still hasn’t appeared in a movie.
Jack, 29, who describes himself as “an aging Donald O’Connor,” did some film tests by himself.
“They were terrific,” says Jack, who has as much self-assurance as he has jokes. “Then they gave me a director and that mixed me up. He started talking about shading and reading my lines with tempo and stuff like that.
“I haven’t got any shading I’ve got four speeds—fast or slow or soft or loud.”
Some people refer to Jack as a “young Fred Allen.” Jack likes that. Fred is his idol. In fact, someone was trying to embarrass him in front of Fred at a New York cocktail party.
"You know, Fred, this Paar fellow worships you like a god.”
To which Fred replied, “What a shame. Five hundred churches in New York and he’s an atheist.”
It was Jack Paar’s irreverence to brass hats, as we said, and of just about everything else out in the Pacific during the war, that brought him to Hollywood’s attention.
Jack was a radio announcer in Cleveland and Buffalo when he was drafted into the army. It soon got around that he was a very funny fellow. He was sent around eastern camps to entertain troops. Then he was assigned to a special service unit of GI talent. For months he and his troupe toured the Pacific foxholes.
Jack became a hero to heroes. He got bigger writeups in the army papers than stars like Benny or Hope or Jack Carson. Paar was just one of the boys—a GI with enough nerve to insult the brass hats.
To a lieutenant who kept talking out loud during one of his shows: “Lieutenant, a man with your I.Q. should have a low voice, too.”
To a commanding officer: “My dear sir, and you are none of the three.
To a noisy captain: “You be quiet or I’ll take your shovel away and you won’t have any fun at the beach tomorrow.”

13 years later, NBC told him to be quiet or they’d take his water closet joke away. He didn’t think that was funny, told his audience they’ve have to do without him and left the studio to let announcer Hugh Downs somehow follow an act like that and fill the rest of the show. Paar may have idolised Fred Allen, who never concealed his dislike for network executives, idiotic sponsor decisions and inane radio programming, but Allen never walked out on his audience because of it. Paar did.

Fred Allen’s remembered, at least by those who still remember him, as a clever analogist and a benevolent man. Paar isn’t. And if he were still with us, he might just whine about that.