He Put the Rant in Durante

There are two things you’ll notice in any newspaper interview with Jimmy Durante—all the quotes are in Durante dialect, and he launches into a monologue that sounds just like one of his acts.

Here’s a good example from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 30, 1940. You can probably hear Durante’s voice as you read this. By the way, the Schnozz was born on today’s date in 1893.

CANDID CLOSE-UPS
Jimmy Durante Discovers Acting Preferable to Sleuthing; Decides to Stick To ‘Keep Off the Grass’
By ROBERT FRANCIS
"I got nothin’ to say," announced Jimmy Durante, eyeing us severely in his dressing room at the Broadhurst. "You newspaper guys made me enough trouble already."
We never take a statement like that from the Durante seriously. He always has plenty to say. And usually gets in the last word.
"Everybody should mind his own business," he went on. "A butcher should cut meat, a banker should cut coupons, an’..."
"And you should stick to cutting capers in "Keep Off the Grass," we suggested.
"Ha," he snorted, indignantly, "everybody wants to get in the act! Stand back! I make the gags!"
"Listen, I read in the papers all about this ‘Fifth Column.’ Somethings got to be done! ‘Jimmy,’ I says, ‘we organize a Gessepo of our own.’ ‘How do I start?’ I asks me.
"I goes into the Astor Bar for a buttermilk. I greets a guy next to me. ‘How dy ye do, Mr. Durante?’ he cracks. Right away I am auspicious. I ask him to cash my check. He does. I am more suspicious.
"He tells me he is a baker. ‘Do you own a car?’ I queries. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘an I got a chauffer, too.’ What effrontery! Now I knows I’m on the scent! Like a dog after a frankfurter!
"I slips out and phones the F. B. I. This is too big to handle alone. They investigates, shadows, wire-taps. What a catastrophe! They discovers he is a Harvard man with money left him!
"So he sues me in Supreme Court for inflamation of character! I tries to camouflage the details, but the judge has a congested mind. He fines me a hundred dollars. Politics! I considers taking it to the Epaulet Division, but I thinks the matter has gone far enough!"
The ever-present Durante cigar stump twisted furiously.
"You’d think that learnt me a lesson, but last week I tries again. Gluttony! I see a suspicious character in . . . (this is for the ‘Eagle,’ ain't it?) . . . in Brooklyn. I trails him through the Park Slope, through Flatbush, into Bay Ridge. What a sleut! He ducks into a house, an’ I waits diligently. I holds my breath an’ watches for him to come out. He don’t. I am breathless.
"All of a sudden a big guy is next to me. We discovers each other siniustaniously! He is a cop. I have claustrophobia! ‘What are you doin’ here?' he barks ominiously. ‘I’m on a suspicious case,’ I ups to him, bold. '‘You look suspicious to me,’ he comes back, frisking me, ‘an’ wearin’ a disguise, eh?’ An’ before I knows it, he grabs me by the schnozzle an’ yanks. The ignominy of it!
"So I’m in court again. I explains to the judge I’m an actor. “Why don’t you work at it?’ he says. ‘I do work at it,’ I replies, ‘Right now I'm in ‘Keep Off the Grass’ at the Broadhurst Theater, New York City.’ ‘Then I fine you ten dollars,’ he retorts, ‘for being nosey an’ not stayin’ where you belong.’ The brutality of it! Durante fined ten bucks for nosetalgia!"
Il Schnozzola waggled his bare toes which were getting an alcohol rub from Tiny, that 200-pound fixture of the Durante menage.
"You guys are responsible for it all," he sighed, plaintively. "You write all that stuff in the papers about ‘boring from within’ and ‘fronts.’ It gets a guy like me all steamed up. I can’t knit, but I wants to do somethin’. But from now on I leaves sleuthin’ to the sleuts. The butcher should cut meat, and the banker. . . ."
"We know, Jimmy," we interrupted, firmly, "and you should stay on 44th St. where you belong. However, there isn't a word of truth in any of this." The Durante grin appeared around the stub of the cigar.
"Well," he drawled, "it might make a good song lyric, at that. And anyway, I told you I had nothin’ to say. You guys have made me trouble enough already."
In any event, that fictitious magistrate may have been gifted with second sight, for "Keep Off the Grass" takes a Summer vacation, begun last night and lasting until mid-August. Jimmy goes to the Coast to make a picture in the interim. He can practice his "sleuthing" for the next six weeks in Hollywood.

A Calabash Explanation

It is impossible to dislike Jimmy Durante.

Durante’s act was, at times, corny and old-fashioned, but it was easy to ignore that. He was having such a good time entertaining that you’d just get caught up in his enthusiasm. And even though he made fun of his nose and vocabulary, he never appeared self-centered.

Dick Kleiner of the National Enterprise Association profiled him in one of his five “funnymen” features in 1950. This column appeared in papers on February 25th. Incidentally, this is one of the few columns I’ve seen where Durante isn’t coy when talking about the identity of Mrs. Calabash.

Carryin's On
Jimmy Durante Loves 'em And so Does His Public
By RICHARD KLEINER
New York—(NEA)—Jimmy Durante is no babe in arms any more. He has to wear glasses when he reads and his hair is so sparse that when he combs it in the morning he has to decide whether the two of them want to be combed east or west. But time has dulled neither his wit nor his vocabulary nor his nose. All three are just as sharp as ever, particularly the schnoz. The great feature of Durante's humor, it dominates his life as it does his face.
Jimmy was posing for a publicity picture in his hotel room here. Always obliging, he had agreed to aid a charity campaign. The idea was to have a close-up of the charity's seal, affixed jauntily to the Durante schnoz.
But the photographer put the seal on the wrong way.
"Wait a minute, Jimmy," said the photographer, "well have to turn it upside down."
"What," said Durante, mortified, "turn de nose upside down? Den people will smell me!"
NOT A WEEK goes by but what the Durante radio show contains at least one reference to the nose. Something like this:
Durante calls the hotel room service and orders a dozen roses, pink lace curtains and the room sprayed with perfume. Asked for an explanation, Durante says:
"The hotel made my nose and I register as man and wife so I thought I'd make it look like a honeymoon suite."
Besides his radio appearances, Jimmy is in constant demand as a night club performer. He thoroughly enjoys himself in his act, because he likes to perform to a live audience.
"Ya know he says, "dere's all de difference in de woild between de oily shows and de free o'clock "show. De free o'clock show is like a party at somebody's house. Everybody's happy — not drunk, but just happy.
"But de dinner-time shows is tough. Dat crowd ya gotta go get—you just gotta go out and get 'em. Ya gotta make friends wit 'em.
"And sometimes dey don't laugh, dey just don't laugh. Den de trapdoor opens and you fall t'rough de floor."
* * *

THAT the trapdoor hasn't opened very often for James Durante is proven by his long, successful career in show business. Now 56, (or possibly a few years older), he was born in New York and grew up helping his father run his barber shop.
But, at 17, he was pounding a piano in a Coney Island night spot and a year later he was accompanying a singing waiter named Eddie Cantor.
In 1923, he teamed up with singer Eddie Jackson and dancer Lou Clayton, and Clayton, Jackson and Durante became one of Broadway's brightest teams. Durante turned down solo offers until the depression flattened show business, then went to Hollywood.
Clayton and Jackson are still with him, the former acting as his business manager and the latter helping with his routines.
The rest is history.
By now, Jimmy is one of the most popular guys in the business, with fellow performers as well as with the laughing public. On his annual visits to New York, his hotel suite is a madhouse. Jimmy holds court in the living room, eating his breakfast about three in the afternoon.
Drinking prune juice (out of a glass especially constructed to accommodate the proboscis) and eating two raw eggs, he explains:
"I been eatin' rore eggs for breakfast for years but I don't know why."
* * *
FOUR WRITERS work on the Durante radio show, with Durante usually in on story conferences "to help kick t'ings around." They usually manage to include a fine assortment of multi-syllable words for Durante to mangle. In one script, here were some of the ones he had to read:
Mispreaprehension, punkrutude, plutonic, sprouse, catastroscope, statnatory.
Those, of course, were designed to be Durante-ized, but there were many others that just sort of fell into the trap, unpremedicatated.
As every Durante fan knows, he closes each show with a reference to "Mrs. Calabash," usually saying, "Good-night, Mrs.' Calabash, wherever you are."
"It was about ten years ago," says Jimmy. "I was in Chicago, between trains. I runs into Mrs. Calabash who was a school friend of mine back here in New York. Mrs. Calabash was her married name. We had a fine time talking about de old days.
"About four years ago, I just fought she'd get a kick out of it if I mentioned her name on de air. So I said 'Good-night, Mrs. Calabash.'
"But I never heard from her, although I got letters from all the wrong Mrs. Calabashes. So I added dat 'wherever you are' because I don't know wherever she is."
Wherever she is, she probably does get a big kick out of Durante. She and millions of others.

Mr. Morfit Becomes a Star

Garry Moore can owe much of his success to three things—his own talent, a sponsor that could pull network strings and an unlikely teaming with ol’ Schnozzola.

Moore had been kicking around NBC day-time radio in the early ‘40s when his agents landed him a guest spot on the “Camel Comedy Caravan” on Friday March 5, 1943. Camel and its agency, William Esty, were delighted and wanted Moore back the following week, and even talked about building a show around him because of the dearth of young comedians. The problem—the “Caravan” was on CBS and Moore was under contract to NBC. Well, it was no problem. Camel sponsored another show, one on Thursday nights on NBC starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Costello got sick. Abbott asked to be let out of his contract until his partner was well. So Camel worked out a deal reported to be worth $1,500 to play a game of musical chairs. Moore was handed the Abbott and Costello NBC Thursday time slot but Camel moved some of the people from the CBS “Caravan” to his show, including Georgia Gibbs, Xavier Cugat and newcomer Jimmy Durante. It debuted March 25th.

All the talk on Radio Row that this was Moore’s show ended quickly. Moore and Durante clicked as a team. Who would have thought it? Durante had previously worked with noisy vaudevillians but Moore’s humour involved wordplay and semi-surreal stories. But the differences complemented each other and listeners could sense a genuinely friendly relationship between the two; there was no person more genuine on the radio than Durante. Moore’s star rose quickly and though he had a lengthy career in radio and TV, he was never better than when he worked with Durante. And Durante remained loveable until the day he died but he never had a better radio cohort than Moore.

Here’s an Associated Press story published a month after the Durante-Moore show went on the air.

Garry Moore’s Tomfoolery Clicks On Night Radio Show
By JEAN MEEGAN
NEW YORK, Apr. 25—(AP)—Until this month Garry Moore’s tomfoolery wasn’t known to anyone who doesn’t listen to the radio before lunch. He joined the aristocracy of radio comedians—those who don’t appear until after dinner—unexpectedly when the Abbott-Costello program was canceled because of Lou Costello’s illness.
But before any radio audience grinned at Moore’s gags (and his are the kind you grin at) he was the class show off. While we were being very serious about comedy, he flashed a fan letter before me and said: “This is what I mean.”
Over my shoulder: “I am under the impression that you are Garry Morfit of Baltimore and at one time went to Baltimore City college. If you are, this is a line of congratulations and best wishes from a former teacher of yours.
“I used to enjoy the ‘programs’ you put on during English history in room 210. When I gave up trying to be tough about your interruptions I laughed too.”
High praise. A comedian has no better friends than they who laugh at his jokes.
Hardworking by nature and training, Moore is quietly authoritative through practise. At 27 he looks like a collar ad with a crew haircut and Princeton length trousers.
His ascent to night-time commercial radio was steady, a little slow but sure—seven years in all. He could be a control engineer, a station manager, or a director with the same facility that he is master of ceremonies. He has done everything in radio, even to sweeping out the studio after everyone has gone home.
His apprenticeship included continuity writing at station WBAL in Baltimore (this period immediately followed his collaboration with F. Scott Fitzgerald on a play that has yet to see the light of day). He went to St. Louis as special events announcer, eased into a variety show, and glided from there into Chicago to the already established “Club Matinee.”
Moore not only pulled the jokes on “Club Matinee,” he made them up. He did the same for “Anything Goes.” As ring leader of that morning show, he became H.V. Kaltenborn’s office mate, and sensing the comical possibilities of this quartering, practiced a telephone imitation of Kaltenborn until it became a pretty good piece of mimicry that he uses to this day.
Because of his flair for mimicry, Moore doesn’t listen to other comedians on the air. He’s afraid he might pick up their idiosyncrasies. All week long he works at his home in Larchmont on his material for the Thursday night broadcast. He doesn’t have a gag writer.
“I like whimsical comedy,” he explains, “punched up with gags, pseudo-serious stuff. I don’t there is any sin in wasting a few words to make a show warm and human. Most of the night-time shows are too fast-paced, they are hysterically trying each to outpunch each other.”
Moore is fervent, too about the way he gets his laughs. The easy way at the moment is to mention a butcher, horse, shoes—he tries to steer clear of these pat provokers. He’d like to try “a ‘clambake show’ on the order of “Anything Goes” after the other comedy shows were finished for the night. I think it would be a sensation.”
His present Thursday night show includes Jimmy Durante and Xavier Cugat and is not on anything like a permanent basis. That’s because the army may require Mr. Moore for a bit of business overseas. But, says Garry, “the army can take me anytime at all now. Just as long as I have hit the mark in night-time radio, it will be easier to return.”

Moore never did end up in the service, though his draft status kept him out of the running of a job hosting “Truth or Consequences” in March 1944 (Ransom Sherman and Harry Von Zell made it to the audition stage). He did end up at the Roxy in New York at the same time for $3,500 a week.

It’s interesting Moore wanted to try something like the earlier versions of “The Tonight Show.” Moore hosted a somewhat quirky daytime show in television in the ‘50s that might have translated into an interesting late-night programme. But I’d still rather watch him work with Durante.

The Big W

It may not be the greatest comedy of all time, but “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (1963) may be one of the most fun, thanks to the hammy cast. A great cast it is, too, full of wonderful movie, radio and TV veterans who somehow were crammed into one film. Plus, how can you dislike a movie where Milton Berle continually gets bashed with Ethel Merman’s handbag?

And who better to steal the opening scene than Jimmy Durante? Here’s a full version of a column that appeared in papers of July 1962, a full year before the film was released, about his role in the epic comic adventure. The photo is courtesy of NEA and was sent to paper with the column.

Film Has Slapstick . . . With Message Yet?
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
Hollywood Correspondent
Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
PALM SPRINGS, Calif., July 7 (NEA) It was as gooey and as slick as the custard in one of Mack Sennett's old throwing pies. It was slapstick but it had, substance — there was a message under the meringue.
Stanley Kramer of Movie Messages Unlimited was delivering it under the title, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." With a $6 million budget and a 133-day shooting schedule he had Mads to spare.
With the message came a pie in the face with a banana peel on the sidewalk. With the largest cast of comedians ever assembled in a film, it was greed — with laughs.
Greed consumes the good, the decent and the noble but it is funny, funny, funny, funny.
It was also "The Treasure of Sierra Madre" with laughs — with Sid Caesar turning a hardware store into a shambles, Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett beserk in an airplane, Jimmy Durante as a bank robber, Ethel Merman as Milton Berle's heckling mother-in-law.
The cast sounded like a meeting of the Screen Actors Guild.
There was Spencer Tracy as a police captain plus all the others — Jonathan Winters. Edie Adams, Dorothy Provine, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Eddie (Rochester) Anderson, Jim Backus, Peter Falk, Paul Ford, Barbara Keller, Arnold Stang, Alan Carney.
Kramer's films (Judgment at Nuremberg, The Defiant Ones, On the Beach, etc.) had delivered more messages than Western Union but this time he had promised "Something a little less serious."
The greed message would be abridged, on a slapstick, in a mad, hilarious chase for buried treasure. Audiences could laugh all the way to the fadeout as the funny men of movies and television became engaged to calamity and then wed to disaster.
As Kramer directed early scenes here for the film with Caesar, Berle, Merman, Rooney, Hackett, Edie Adams, Dorothy Provine and Winters, the stars became more and more aware of another message.
It was the message that Kramer is an uncompromising perfectionist.
After a long Saturday of rehearsing and filming parts of a scene involving, all of them 115-degree temperature on a desert highway, he announced to his film editor:
"Don't print anything we shot today. We'll start fresh, from the top, Monday morning." It was throwing $20,000 (the daily cost) to the desert winds but he said the words with cool patience.
It was a long scene with complicated, argumentative dialog about how the $350,000 treasure, if found, would be split between them. In a way, it sounded like a meeting of Mickey Rooney's creditors, with confused Mickey telling Sid Caesar at one point:
"Sure, I know, you'd rather have one fourth than two-eighths."
Between rehearsals. Buddy Hackett chuckled to us: "I'm going to hire Mickey as my accountant."
For eight hours in the heat they rehearsed, became confused, became unconfused and blew their lines. But all the sweat left nothing on film as Kramer blew the whistle.
Jimmy Durante finally landed in front of a camera for that actor's delight — a big emotional death scene. It wasn't "Camille" but it was true to the code of Laugh Week. Jimmy had the last laugh even after his last breath.
He kicked the bucket both emotionally and literally.
Five top comedians, what's more, had to stand by, frozen-faced and without a line of dialog, while The Nose and the bucket shared the camera lens.
Casting Jimmy as Smiler Grogan, a bank robber whose death in an auto-gone-over-a-cliff triggers a mad rush to find $350,000 in buried cash, was offbeat enough for "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World."
But Jimmy kicking that rusty old bucket as his leg stiffens in death was an obstreperous clue to the reason for all the "Mad's" in the title of Stanley Kramer's $6 million comedy.
It was funny, funny, funny, funny.
The bucket as kicked by Jimmy in the William and Tania Rose script started clanking down the rocky mountainside with the camera following it all the way. Down and down and around it went, prodded now and then by special effects in some outlandish gyrations.
Jimmy even had time to get up from his "death bed," dust himself off and watch the old bucket clatter until it was out of sight.
"Now dere," said Jimmy, "is a death scene.'
The witnesses to his death and the bucket caper were Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Mickey Rooney and Jonathan Winters. But they didn't laugh, anv of them, until Jimmy grinned:
"Yes, sir, how about dat. Who needs one of them method dramamine coaches."
How Jimmy's speeding automobile landed him in its twisted wreckage as a highway statistic for the film was something new for the screen, too. There was a day when a movie stunt man would have been lined to drive a car at top speed, then leap from the wheel at the cliff's edge like Jimmy Dean did in that game of "chicken."
But the guided missile age, has come to movie cars-over-the-cliff, too. The spectacular crash, at 60 miles an hour, was radio-controlled with a dummy at the wheel and a camera in the car's back seat. The camera w«s encased in a shatterproof sphere, like those installed in airplanes for after-crash instrument readings.
Four other cameras at various angles caught the car's plunge off the highway for what will be the opening scene in the film. No penny saver, producer-director Kramer filmed the sequence four times with four autos purchased at a used car lot.
The radio-electronic system worked so well that only one of the cars missed its "landing" mark, end then by only a few feet from a starting line 550 yards from the cliff's edge.
It's a short, short, short, short World, too: Contact lenses come as sun glasses, you know, and Edie Adams was wearing green ones for her hours in the sun on location here . . .
Irving Berlin paged Ethel Merman for his new Broadway musical, "Mr. President," but at the time she was planning a European tour in "Gypsy." "So," says Ethel, a bit sadly, "he rewrote the show and then my tour was canceled."

I'm Flabbergasketed

Hollywood made a couple of movies about Al Jolson and one about Eddie Cantor. It’s a shame it didn’t do the same thing with Jimmy Durante.

Jimmy’s life had enough drama and atmosphere to make a good film (especially with a little dramatic embellishment). So it’s a shame that some studio didn’t work out a deal when it had the chance. Durante’s biography was written in 1949 by one of W.C. Fields’ drinking buddies, Gene Fowler, and United Press columnist Virginia MacPherson learned an option on it was being pursued in Tinseltown. She talked with Durante about it. A couple of things about her column are interesting. One is that she, like everyone else it seems, wrote Durante’s quotes in his dialect. The other is that Durante didn’t get a cent from the sale of any books. Fowler got it all. That just doesn’t seem quite fair. Dem’s da conditions dat prevail, I guess.

MacPherson obliquely refers to the fact that Larry Parks played Jolson on the screen because Jolson was too old. The immortal Keefe Brasselle was Cantor for the same reason. But she’s right. Who else could play Durante but Durante?

The column is from 1949.

‘Flabbergasketed’ Jimmy Watches ‘Schnozz’ Sales
By Virginia MacPherson
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 23. (U.P.)—Jimmy Durante whose life story “Schnozola” has hit the best seller lists already, says he’s “flabbergasketed” anybody’d shell out three bucks to read about him.
“I really am,” rasped the little guy with the big beak. “An’ dat’s a fack. It’s sold more ‘n 50,000 awreddy . . . Imagine! All does people gittin’ on de inside o’Durante.
“I’LL BE ENTERTAINING at the Greater Los Angeles Press club. Maybe I oughta take a few copies down ‘n peddle ‘em, huh?”
Jimmy doesn't get a penny of the proceeds from all this—those go to author Gene Fowler and the publishing firm.
“But what I’m gittin’ outa dis, honey,” he twinkled, “couldn’t be bought wit money.”
DURANTE SPENT months “spillin’ my heart out” to Fowler, who lolled in an easy chair, turned on a wire recorder, asked a question now and then, and just listened happily while the “Schnozz” spun his yarns of the old days in show business.
“I didn't have any idea what he was gonna put in," Jimmy added. “To tell de troot, I t’ink he left out a lotta good stuff.
“AND I DON’T like the pitchas he put in. A lotta dem are just gags. Day don’t belong in a book like dat. But what the heck . . . It’s a helluva good writing job.
“I’ve read it free times myself awreddy. And dere’s parts of it dat jist make me cry. Jeez, it sure brings back the memories . . . it sure does.”
IT’S PROBABLY gonna bring him a lot more ‘n that. MGM, 20th-Century-Fox and Paramount studios are scrambling for the rights to put it on the screen.
"Dis story’s gotta be told,” Jimmy nodded. “Not on accounta Durante. Heck, dere’s more about Lou Clayton in it dan there is about me.
“But it’s a nice story about me and my Missus and Eddie Jackson and Clayton... all the people who've been wit’ me fer years. It’s a kinda family story. Make a good pitcha, I betcha.”
THE MASTERMINDS are already looking around for a young feller to play Durante’s part. At which point MacPherson, the No. 1 Durante fan in these parts, will register an official complaint.
All the “Schnozz” needs to look 20 years younger is a little hair. What he’s got left is white and kind of wispy. But Mac Factor’s wig experts could remedy that in two shakes.
HE WAS NO BEAUTY when he was 16 and he’s no beauty now. But the same old gleam is still here.
“Da’s ‘cause I’m still havin’ fun,” Jimmy says modestly.
“And I’ve kept me shapely figger. No bulges around Durante’s diagram.”
No sir, the idea of anybody else playing Durante is something we don’t even like to think about. It’d be nothing short of heresy.

Catastrophobe

Everyone laughed at how Jimmy Durante butchered the English language, Durante included. It wasn’t an act. Radio listeners and TV viewers knew it. Durante’s genuineness was one of the reasons for his lasting popularity.

Journalists, on the other hand, are proponents of correctness in language, mocking misplaced modifiers and decrying dangling participles (and ridiculing the kind of alliteration you’ve just read). But even journalists liked Durante’s meat-grinder effect on the vernacular. And one grouchy newspaper radio critic in particular.

The New York Herald Tribune’s John Crosby took advantage of the Durante-Moore show 1946-47 season opener to wax Durante’s occasional failure to maintain any resemblance of command of the King’s English. Or any other English but his own. This column is from October 12, 1946, one of several he wrote about the Durante show over the next seven or eight years.

Radio Review
LANGUAGE A LA DURANTE
By JOHN CROSBY
One of the distinguishing characteristics of American English, says H. L. Mencken in “The American Language,” “is its impatient disregard for grammatical, syntactical and phonological rule and precedent.” Possibly the most impatient breaker of new ground and old precedents is that amiable, fuzz-topped, snaggle-tooth, elephant-beaked, philological explosion known as Jimmy Durante. Durante has violated the language so mercilessly and for so many years that Mrs. Malaprop may yet lose her title and a mangled word may well become a Durante, just as a telephone became an Ameche. The lovable Schnozzle, it seems to me, has established a far more convincing claim to the title than Mrs. Malaprop. Offhand, I can think of only one true malapropism—“You go first and I’ll precede”— whereas I can muster up a dozen Durantes, all of which are far more inventive than anything conceived by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Maybe it’s wrong even to mention Mrs. Malaprop in the same breath with Durante, who improves the old words rather than misues them. Jimmy, in fact, assaults the language with such dignity and self-confidence that it is sometimes a question whether he is not right and every one else wrong. A “catastrophobe,” for instance, seems a more plausible and descriptive word than catastrophe. A catastrophobe would be a more calamitous calamity than a mere catastrophe, just as anything “colossial” is far larger than the merely colossal. An “exhilirator” certainly sounds as if it would make an automobile go faster than an accelerator.
VIOLENT LANGUAGE
Under Jimmy’s editing, language assumes a violence it never had before. Chiefly because the Durante personality requires expression beyond the reach of ordinary English. Nothing routine ever happens to Jimmy. On one of his recent broadcasts, Durante told of stoppin’ his town and country jeep for a red light. And what did he find in front of him—a lady driver! That would be only a mild irritant to anyone but Jimmy, who lives in an atmosphere composed of one-third oxygen and two-thirds exclamation points. By the time the lady finished powdering her nose, the light had changed from red to green three times, and Jimmy had a terrible time “keepin’ my impatience from runnin’ amuck.”
There is no such thing as a stock phrase in Jimmy's vocabulary, and if he lives long enough there may not be a stock phrase in anyone else’s. "Woman the lifeboats! "Woman the lifeboats!” He roared on one of his programs. “You mean man the lifeboats,” said his partner, Garry Moore. “You stick to your hobby and I’ll stick to mine!” howled Durante.
KIDDING THE LANGUAGE
On another occasion, in a duet with Moore, the pair sang the following couplet:
“You’re going to the dogs, that’s easy to see.
“That’s too much like work. The dogs’ll have to come to me.”
Jimmy is really kidding the language, particularly the trite and pompous sections of it. On his new and considerably revitalized program (C.B.S., 6:30 p.m. Pacific Time, Fridays), Durante pricks many other pretensions besides those of language. On one broadcast Jimmy made a shambles of the whole decorating profession when he came to grips with “the upholstered mind” of a decorator named Heathcliff.
“I told him I didn’t want a naughty pine wardrobe, Chippydale chairs and drunken Fife furniture,” yowled Schnozzle. He was explaining at the time about his living room: “When you step on the carpet you sink six feet—no floor.
“My house,” boasted Jimmy, “is composed entirely of rooms.”
IT’S SHARP-TOOTHED
The new Durante show is far more sharp-toothed than last season’s. On it, Durante has been letting his impatience run amuck at radio quiz shows.
"Which would you rather have—Lauren Bacall or a box of palmettos?”—“How many in the box?”; the men of distinction series—“He’s a ‘seven up’ man—he can count up to seven”; and “Queen For a Day.”
There are possibly a few too many straight gags, which put constrictions on the Durante personality, but not enough to be bothersome. Jimmy still has trouble with his pianist. “Stabbed in my obbligato by a fortissimo!” he’ll howl when asked for that note (“what a note!” and get the wrong one. And he still sings those dizzy songs in that foghorn of a voice.
If you're tired of those same old words day after day, you might try the Durante-Moore show. To put it in Jimmy’s own phraseology, dere’s a million guys on the radio who speak English, but Jimmy’s a novelty.

I must confess I’m puzzled by Crosby’s reference to “the new Durante show,” mainly because so few of Durante’s shows with Garry Moore are in circulation to see what he means. I’ve found nothing to indicate anything about the show was new. It had the same sponsor, announcer and vocalist as the previous season. The only change had been made in March and that was in time slots. The real change was the following season. Moore left the programme voluntarily and Durante went through a ridiculously large number of sidekicks over the next three years—Arthur Treacher, Victor Moore, Don Ameche and Alan Young.

It’s a shame Garry Moore didn’t stay. Working with Durante showed off his talent far better than anything he did afterward. And the Schnozz never found a radio partner as good as The Haircut; Victor Moore’s whiny little voice just grates after a while. But both Durante and Moore moved into television and carried on with great success. Separating them, as the Durante dictionary would say, was no “catastrophobe.”

America’s Most Beloved Showman

Why is Jimmy Durante great? I’ve been pondering how to word the answer to that but, in the process, discovered some anonymous newspaper headline writer in 1954 did it for me. In one sentence. It reads:

Jimmy Durante, The People’s Choice For Title Of America’s Most Beloved Showman, Is Real

Durante was around in an era where there were plenty of hammy, corny people on stage—and they wanted you to know they were on stage. They were among the top acts, too. Durante was somehow different. He was hammy and corny too, but there was something down-to-earth about him. He laughed at himself as much as anyone else did. And while he loved to put on a show, it seems he was doing it for the hell of it and not to leave you with the impression he was the epitome of show business in capital letters.

The headline above was one of the many that were printed above a weekend newspaper feature story on Durante by noted reviewer James Bacon, then of the Associated Press.

Perhaps to the dismaying ego of the writer, wire service stories are written to be edited. Writers can’t predict how much space a subscribing paper has, so their stories are generally structured to allow an editor to choose X number of paragraphs and drop the rest. Bacon’s piece on Durante, which appeared in American papers as of December 5, 1954, was no different. So I’ve played news editor and cobbled together all the paragraphs from about a half-dozen differently-chopped versions. I’m sure Bacon—and fans of Durante—would be happy I’ve tried to restore his full story as best as possible. The stock photo of Clayton, Jackson and Durante accompanied the article; I’ve substituted others from the internet for the rest.

EVERYBODY LOVES THE GUY WHO SAYS
‘Goodnight, Mrs. Kalabash’
(Editor’s Note—Things were exceptionally rough for young Jimmy Durante. He not only had to fight his way up New York’s East Side, but he had to do it with the extra handicap of taking piano lessons. Now, at 61, he’s not only one of the world’s great pianists, he’s quite a guy besides.)
By James Bacon
Associated Press Newsfeatures Writer
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 4 (AP)—WHO IS THE MOST BELOVED person in show business?
At least a score in Hollywood, New York or Las Vegas lay claim to the title and all have the press agents to prove it. But the rightful claimant, in most minds, is a little guy with a heart as big as his nose — and no press agent.
Jimmy Durante would be the first to deny that he deserves any such affection. Yet on the wall of his Beverly Hills den hangs a plaque from B'nai B'rith which bestows the accolade on him in gold engraving. It may be significant that the donor is Jewish, the recipient Catholic.
There are a number of reasons why folks feel the way they do.
Durante’s kindness is legendary, his loyalty has a memory that reaches all the way back to his boyhood. He may die broke as a result.
Stagehands get $100 tips after his TV shows. A few years ago he played the London Palladium for four weeks at $10,000 a week. The trip cost him $50,000. He took along 11 friends, only five of whom were needed in the act.
“It was probably da foist and last time any of dese guys would ever get to see Europe,” Jimmy explained.
At 61, an age when he should be slowing down, he still does as many or more benefits than anyone in town. But he avoids the big star-studded affairs, concentrates his talents in such places as obscure parish churches where a pastor needs a little help in building a playground or adding a classroom to a school. As for the big affairs where studio bosses try to outdo each other in commanding talent to appear:
“Dose benefits got too much entertainment,” Durante says. “Why should I knock myself out for millionaires who can afford to pay for entertainment while dese little places that ain’t got none are screamin’ for it? Me and Eddie Jackson always work better in de little spots anyhow."
Jackson is an example of Durante's loyalty. Years ago he and Lou Clayton joined Durante and put on a club act. When Clayton was stricken a few years ago, Durante spent hours at his bedside, was crushed when he died.
Jackson isn’t essential to Durante’s act those days, but he’s on the bill for a steady spot. Jimmy is proud of Jackson’s success on TV, and fades into the background for a moment when he introduces “Eddie Jackson of Clayton, Jackson and Durante.”
HE'S SORRY that Clayton didn’t live to make a comeback in this new medium.
“Lou would have added class to da act,” Jimmy says.
Durante’s boyhood may provide the answer to his character today.
His Lower East Side neighbourhood was as tough as any in New York, and a spawning ground for many hoodlums. Growing up, Jimmy had an extra cross to bear. He was known as the kid who took piano lessons. But now he’s grateful for the insistence of his Italian father that he keep up with his music. Otherwise, he thinks, he might have wound up in Sing Sing, as some of his school chums did.
He could quit with the jokes today, and still be a big star.
“Wit hair,” he conceeds, “I cud be anudder Liberace.”
He’s a legitimate musician, a composer who has written hundreds of songs, including some he made famous. His early years were spent playing in honky tonks, where he was billed as “Ragtime Jimmy, the King of Harlem.” Once, in a Coney Island spot, he teamed up with a singing waiter, a fellow with pop eyes who bounced ail over the floor as he sang. The waiter was Eddie Cantor.
CANTOR RECALLS that musicians from other places used to gather after hours to watch Durante beat out barrelhouse and ragtime rhythms.
“Jimmy was a piano player’s piano player,” says Cantor now. “There was no greater compliment. He was the greatest jazz pianist of that era.”
He still could be, except that his comedy routines won’t let him play more than a few bars at at a time.
Durante and Cantor used to boast to customers that the number never was written that they couldn’t sing and play. It was a gimmick that brought big tips from homesick drunks.
“We could make good 95 per cent of the time,” recalls Cantor, “but once in a while someone would ask for some piece like ‘South Dakota Blues’ which we never heard of. Jimmy would compose the melody on the spot and I would do the same with lyrics. Most of the time, the drunks were happy but once in a while one would squawk. Our stock answer was: ‘Do you mean there are two songs with the same title?’”
When World War I came, Jimmy went in the Army but his knowledge of music got him in the band instead of the Infantry.
“Here I was leadin’ a band I down Broadway to sell liberty bonds. What a war dat was!”
Jimmy took up bandleading after the war, made friends with a strutting singer by the name of Eddie Jackson. Prohibition came and a waiter approached Durante with the idea of opening a speakeasy.
They hired a sign painter to hang up a sign. He couldn’t spell any better than Durante and thus the Club Durant was born. Durante and Jackson didn’t have enough capital to put the extra E on the sign, so it stayed Durant and became one of the landmarks of the prohibition era.
Clayton, one of vaudeville’s top soft shoe dancers, came in later to form the famous team.
At first Durante confined himself to playing the piano and greeting customers. His natural friendliness caused the club trouble in those shaky days. Jackson recalled the time two customers couldn’t get by the doorman.
“Jimmy waved them in, shook hands with them, bought them a round of drinks and the next morning the place was padlocked. They were revenue men.”
Durante played piano for awhile then decided he should try for laughs, too. His roughhouse comedy was timed for that rowdy era. He started playing the piano less and throwing the furniture at drummer Jack Roth more.
Roth, who has been the target for Durante's wild antics for 30 years, claims he's never missed a beat no matter how many things Durante threw at him.
“He only hit me once with the piano top,” says Roth. “It took four stitches to close my head but I kept right on drumming.”
Clayton, Jackson and Durante, along with Texas Guinan, became the top attractions of this giddy period. Sime Silverman, the founder of Variety, became a booster of the three. Soon they were out of the club and playing the Palace.
In this period of 1928-29-30 they would play three shows a day in such legitimate vaudeville theaters as the Palace. In between those legal shows and after midnight they would double into floor shows of such famed Broadway speakeasys as the Silver Slipper and Frivolity.
Their energy was unbelievable. Between the Palace and the speakeasy clubs they were playing from six to eight shows a day between noon and 2 a.m.
Next came Broadway shows and in the early ‘30s the movies beckoned — but only to Durante.
Characteristically, he brought the whole bunch along. Clayton became business manager and when personal appearances or benefits came up, it was Clayton, Jackson and Durante again. Only Clayton’s death in 1950 split them.
DURANTE may have been the big star of pictures and radio but when the trio performed, he was just one of the act.
The town is full of stories about him, some of the best told by Jimmy himself.
‘Way back in 1933, Jimmy met Ethel Barrymore in the MGM casting office.
“A hell of a nice dame,” recalls Jimmy. “She told me how much she and her brudder Jack liked my woik. I told her if dere’s anyt’ing I can do for ya’ — put in a word or somethin’ — I'll do it.”
Durante’s abuse of the king’s English is no affectation. He was brought up on New York’s Lower East Side and quit school in the seventh grade.
But when the Jesuits who run Loyola University of Los Angeles needed somebody for a TV short to plug the educational advantages of the school, they chose Durante.
“The fodders had a lot of trouble with me,” says Jimmy. "I couldn’t pronounce the name of the school. They kept telling me it’s Loyola but I couldn’t say Loyola so I kept calling it Lyola. How about dat? I changed the name of the university.”
ONCE GARRY MOORE, a radio partner of Durante’s, tried to educate Durante so he would pronounce the words right on the radio. It was a hopeless effort and finally one day Durante took Moore aside and said:
“You mean well, kid, and tanks, but if you teach me to say dem words right, we’re both out of a job.”
Durante’s memory, or lack of it, with scripts is famous in television.
“I’m de only comic who don’t need no cards or prompters,” he boasts.
“No wonder,” chimes in partner Eddie Jackson. “You can’t read.”
When Jimmy loses his place in the script, the laughs still fall because no one can get confused quite as hilariously as Jimmy — but it can be a tough spot for a straight guest star.
John Wayne went on one night with Durante in two separate sketches. Jimmy remembered his lines all right, but not in the proper order—or sketch.
"Here I am standing there with egg on my face in the first sketch. If it had been anyone else I would have walked off the stage, but I love the guy so I just stood there looking silly—and an actor with nothing to say can look pretty silly.”
The rabid Durante fan, and there are millions, couldn’t care less about scripts where Durante is concerned. To them, Durante only has to appear and do the same thing week after week — and he often does.
WHAT OTHER COMIC could get by for years, as Durante has, with the same opening and ending and little variation in between? It may come as a revelation to many constant viewers that Durante always starts off with “Ya gotta start each day wid a song,” and then segues into “Let me hear dat note” and “stop da music.”
And his ending, “Goodnight, Mrs. Kalabash, wherever you are,” is easily the most poignant — and oldest — ending in show business.
And who is Mrs. Kalabash?
No one, not even Jackson, knows.
“Many years ago,” confides Jackson, “I asked Jimmy who she was and all he said was, ‘Eddie, be a pal. Don’t ever ask me again’ and I never have.”
Many, who claim to know, say it is just a piece of smart showmanship to put a little heart into the act, also a little mystery, but that it is wholly fictitious. Others say that it is a greeting to a long ago boarding house matron who befriended Jimmy when he was a hungry piano player.
BUT BEST GUESS — and I base that on a reporter’s intuition after asking him the question many times — is that it’s the pet name for his wife, to whom he was very devoted. She died in 1943.
Durante married Jeanne Olson, then a beautiful singer in the night club where the not-too-handsome Jimmy was the pianist. That was 1921.
Other than one rift — when she sued him for separate maintenance for breaking up the furniture — they were much in love. During the last year and a half of her life when she was very ill, Jimmy gave up his career to be at her side.
He never has remarried though in recent years he has squired red-haired Margie Little to premieres and openings. But like anyone else who is friendly with Durante, she must share him along with the rest of the Durante entourage of Jackson, pianist Jules Buffano, drummer Jack Roth, writer Jackie Barnett and a half dozen others.”
“Where Durante goes, everybody goes,” asserts The Schnoz.

Durante’s Schnozz at 30

“Never changes his act,” is how an angry comic once berated Hearst columnist Jack O’Brian about Jimmy Durante. Mind you, O’Brian realised he couldn’t take the complaint seriously when it began with a praise of Milton Berle’s talents only to end with same comedian ripping into Berle for his lack of talent.

O’Brian’s column came out in June 1946, the same month when Durante was marking his show biz anniversary. Well, actually, it wasn’t really quite his idea, as you’ll see.

Newspaper columnists always seem to have written Durante quotes in dialect. Anyone who knows Durante can hear him speak the lines.

Jimmy Durante Celebrating
By BOB THOMAS
HOLLYWOOD, May 30.—Cucumber-nose Jimmy Durante is celebrating his 30th year in show business and everybody is getting into the act.
“I yam touched,” said the Schnoz. “People are sayin’ such nice t’ings about me. They’re even takin’ out ads in da trade papers.”
I found Jimmy in the madhouse which he calls a home. He said that next Wednesday will mark the 30th anniversary of his debut at the piano of a Harlem dive. Of course, had been playing at Coney Island and elsewhere before that time, but MGM “rearranged” the anniversary to coincide with the release of Jimmy's latest, “Two Sisters From Boston.”
Response to the stunt will be enthusiastic; Jimmy is one of the best-loved characters in the business.
“Dis is da most wonderful t’ing that has ever happened to me,” Jimmy confided. "When 1 think of it, I git goose pimples all over.”
The celebration will be climaxed by a violent night at what used to be the Silver Slipper in New York. There Jimmy and his partners, Eddie Jackson and Lou Clayton will put on an all-night show, just as they did in prohibition days. The management should be warned that the boys are going to do the “wood” number for the first time since 1931. The routine extols the virtues of wood with practical illustrations, such as matches, pianos, ladders, etc.
“We’ll tear da jernt apart,” Jimmy vowed.

Here’s what the United Press had to say on June 6th, the day after the big soirée.

Jimmy Durante Celebrates Anniversary of His Nose
By JACK GAVER
NEW YORK. — (U.P.) — Jimmy Durante took a fanfare in stride as his just due, measured off two paces from the microphone to give himself nose room, looked around at the freeloaders and passed a hand ruefully across his sparsely inhabited scalp.
“There’s not much there,” he commented. One of those meaningful Durante pauses, then
the explosive kicker: “But every strand has a muscle.”
Back Where He Started.
And Jimmy was off to the races. Not the Jimmie of the movies or the radio, but Jimmy the well-dressed man, the guy Broadway can’t do without, the slambang, piano-wrecking Jimmy of the night clubs celebrating his 30th year in show business.
“After workin’ hard fer 30 years,” he said, “I wind up where I started from—workin’ fer nuttin’!”
The affair was in a basement room now called the Golden Slipper dance hall. But 18 years ago it was the Silver Slipper, one of the real hot spots of the prohibition era which employed the great comedy team of Clayton, Jackson and Durante. Last night it bore the temporary name of Club Durante and Lou Clayton, the former dancer, and Eddie Jackson, the strutting singer, were back with the master.
“I been lucky to havee a manager like Lou Clayton,” Jimmy said. “But tell me, folks, how much is 300 per cent?
“The Club Durante! What a joint! Why, I looked into a cuppa cawfee a while ago, and what ya t’ink I found? Cawfee!”
Back in prohibition days coffee cups were a disguise for more potent potions.
"Folks, I’m really an imposter, Jimmy confessed. “This is actually the anniversary of my nose. It was born first. I came along two weeks later. My father said when he saw me that he didn’t mind the country havin’ an eagle fer an emblem, but that didn’t mean he had to raise one.”
Big Names Present.
Clayton did some fast stepping and Durante commented: “Look at him! Hasn’t danced in 20 years and he still wears taps on his shoes. I have to do 12 guest shows a year to keep that Clayton in golf balls. Ah, this reminds me of the old days of the club Durant. The four of us—Clayton, Jackson and Durante—and an interpreter!”
There’s no use trying to name the people who attended the party for which M-G-M, Jimmy’s movie employer, picked up the check. Every big name along Broadway was there. Mayor William O’Dwyer showed up for a few minutes and slipped out a side entrance. Pretty soon a man who was stumbling over the 600 jampacked well-wishers collared a fellow who had a straw skimmer in custody under one arm. “The mayor wants his hat,” he said. "He’s up in the street.” The two of them escorted the headgear to his honor.

A vaudeville comedian was staying at a small-town boarding house where meals were included. “What are you serving tonight?” he asked. “Nothing but ham and corn,” said the owner. Replied the vaudevillian: “That’s funny, I serve the same thing.”

Durante could be accused of dishing out from the same menu. But he was such genuine, unassuming guy on stage, radio and, finally, TV that everybody loved him to the end.