Why Kenny Baker Quit Jack Benny

On June 18, 1939, singer Kenny Baker appeared on ‘The Jack Benny Program’ and to all the world it sounded like he would be with the rest of the cast the following week broadcasting from Waukegan, Illinois. He never made it. He was never part of Benny cast again (though he later made two guest appearances).

So what happened?

Benny fans have debated for years whether Baker was fired, whether he quit, whether he left on good terms or bad.

It took Baker more than five years before he talked about it. And, even then, it seems pieces of the story are missing. Here’s a syndicated news article from 1944, at a time he was on Broadway and had shot a couple of films, including ‘Silver Skates.’

Kenny Baker Tired of Being Just a Jerk
Walks Out of Job Paying Him $150,000 a Year
By Art Cohn
NEW YORK, Nov. 1 (INS)—Kenny Baker was tired of being a jerk, even a $150,000 per year jerk.
The world knew him only as the high-voiced dope on Jack Benny’s program who made such incredibly yappy remarks everyone else on the show sounded like an intellectual by comparison, even Phil Harris. Kenny was the all-American oaf and everyone wanted him to remain that way.
He had become a jerk unconsciously. Most jerks do. He stopped being one intentionally. Most jerks don’t.
“It wasn’t easy walking away from $150,000 a year,” he said last night in his dressing room at the Imperial theatre, “but I realized if I didn’t kill the jerk character it would kill me.”
Kenny had to make his choice: To remain A. Jerk at $3000 a week or to be K. Baker with no offers in sight. It was a big gamble but he took it. He quit Fred Allen’s program more than a year ago and rejected dozens of movie, stage and radio offers—each one wanted him only as a 21-karat Stoopnagle.
“I was doing concerts,” he recalls, “sang with symphonies, went to England and made ‘The Mikado’ but nobody would take me seriously, they thought of me only as a jerk. I couldn't get a straight part to save my soul. That made me mad.”
The fact he has a boyish face and does not look a day over 22, although he is 10 years older, did not help either.
Father of Three
“It’s awfully embarrassing,” he growled. “When I bought a ranch in California last year, the man who sold it to me insisted that my father sign the papers; he didn’t think I was old enough.”
Rather ironical, considering that Baker is, the father of three children—Kenny, Jr., 7; Susan, 4 ½, and Johnny, the 8-month-old baby.
The “jerk,” as he always refers to the character he portrayed on the radio, was an accident.
“Mr. Benny originally hired me only as a soloist,” he says, “after I won a national audition conducted by Eddie Duchin. I was a genuine hayseed when I started on the program. I had lived in Long Beach, California, all my life and had never been on a train, let alone out of the state.
“I was 24, but shaved only once a week. I wore a $22 tuxedo, had the darndest mop of bushy hair and two buck teeth. The first night I stumbled over three chairs and when I was introduced to Mary Livingston I said, ‘How do you do, I am sure.’ It was on the level; that was the way I looked and talked.
A Sap Is Born
“Harry Conn, who was Mr. Benny’s chief script writer at the time, nearly split a gut laughing at me that first night. Then he got together with Mr. Benny and they began giving me hick lines to read...”.
And a new national symbol for a sap was born.
Baker is a revelation as the leading juvenile in “A Touch of Genius,” Broadway’s latest musical hit. The critics gave him rave notices and, as a result, he has received special offers to return to radio—in a serious drama. He is about to sign for a weekly half-hour show over a national network, one combining his talents as a singer and narrator.

Baker isn’t being altogether forthright when he said “No offers were in sight” when he quit the Benny show. Even if it were true he was under contract to Mervyn LeRoy Productions, as each Benny broadcast reminded listeners, and LeRoy certainly wouldn’t let him sit idle. Not only was he on screens in ‘The Mikado’ in an unjerk-like performance praised by critics, he was also pulling down good cash every Wednesday night as the vocalist on ‘The Texaco Star Theatre,’ starring Ken Murray. In fact, one syndicated newspaper columnist suggested on the day he missed the Benny show in Waukegan that “Texaco would like to have Kenny Baker’s services exclusively.” And that’s exactly what happened. By July 15, newspapers reported Baker’s exclusive contract and that Jack was looking for a new vocalist.

Fans who prefer not to do research have suggested Fred Allen somehow enticed his phoney feuder’s singer away, but Allen didn’t join the ‘Texaco Star Theatre’ until 1940. In a way, Fred joined Kenny’s show.

The article claims Baker quit Allen’s show, but Billboard magazine of August 22, 1942 tells a quite different story. The show was being cut from 60 minutes to a half hour in the fall, which was a perfect opportunity to dump Baker. Reported Billboard:

Baker, who drew $2,000 weekly for singing two songs, proved to be a constant headache to producers because of his alleged prima donna attitude.
The singer, because of the stipulation in his contract giving him the right to choose his own selections, was allegedly difficult to handle. This might have been worked out, according to an Allen spokesman, but he kept picking slow numbers which consumed anywhere from three to four minutes and which caused Allen a good deal of concern because they slowed the program. Christmas Eve he insisted on doing the Ave Maria in German instead of the customary Latin, an incident which cause Texaco much embarrassment because the mail man brought in loads of protests from irate listeners [remember, the U.S. was fighting Hitler at the time]. This was not the entire reason for X-ing him off the spot, but it helped.

In other words, in an exhibition of irony (if Billboard was correct), Baker was being a jerk.

The character that Baker found so objectionable to play on the Benny show was a continuation and modification of the one singer Frank Parker had played on the show. After Baker left, the character was tweaked a little bit more and was handed to Eugene McNulty, along with the name of Dennis Day. If Dennis had a problem playing a daft young man, he never told anyone. It led to a long and lucrative career with Jack, and on his own. In addition, along the way, it was discovered Dennis had a very good ear for mimicry and that was incorporated into the show. And, though all these characters were silly (though not truly moronic like, say, Charlie Cantor’s Finnegan on ‘Duffy’s Tavern’), people weren’t really laughing at them. They had been given comedy lines by Jack Benny, who was the real fall guy on his own programme.

Baker’s hopes of a skyrocketing career after walking away from the Benny show never really materialised, even when compared to Dennis Day. The “weekly half-hour show” mentioned in the newspaper article lasted eight weeks after the story was written and was replaced with Danny Kaye and Harry James. Baker took over ‘Glamour Manor’ (later named ‘The Kenny Baker Show’) in 1946 for a season. He never had a starring radio show after that, let alone one on television. With few prospects, he retired in the early 1950s to record a few gospel albums and, perhaps, mull over whether quitting ‘The Jack Benny Program’ was really the best thing to do.

Dog Trouble

There are no credits on the version of the Tom and Jerry cartoon ‘Dog Trouble’ (1942) on DVD, save the directors and producer, but Irv Spence was hard at work. A few frames from one of his scenes.





In showing these to animator Mark Kausler, he says “Don't forget the masterful skill of the cel painters and inkers, who took a pencil scribble and made a colorful smear that supports the action.”

George Gordon, Jack Zander and Pete Burness also animated on the earliest Tom and Jerrys but Spence has the reputation of the most uninhibited animation of the group. You can see why.

Paul Terry, Aesop and the Missus

There was a time when Paul Terry didn’t have the same toilet-splash sound in every cartoon. That’s because his splash, if there was one, didn’t make any noise. Paul Terry made silent cartoons.

His history has been elucidated in numerous animation history books. But let’s hear Terry in his own words. And his wife’s, too.

Terry’s ‘Aesop Fables’ of the 1920s were, apparently, the cartoons Walt Disney looked up to when he first went into animation. Terry explains how he created them. You can take his story for what it’s worth, especially considering there’s no mention of the heavy influence of Felix the Cat on his ‘Henry.’ This is in the Oakland Tribune of January 16, 1928.

Romance Born In Studio With Terry’s “Fables” Cat
By NANCY BARR MAVITY.
It all began in fun.
That is one way of describing the romance of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Terry—the first member of the matrimonial firm being the creator of those animated cartoons known to the world as “Fables, Inc.,” and the second an artist who drew those same lively wiggles as a member of the “Fables” staff.
Terry is visiting his native California, with his wife, as the guest of his sister, Mrs. Carrie Donnelly, 2159 Stuart street, Berkeley.
“We’ve been married four years, and still speak—a long distance record for the movie world,” says Paul.
“I was the only woman on the staff so he married me to make it a stag studio—but there was no getting rid of me that easily,” says Irma—and snatching a pencil, she produces a cartoon wherein linked hearts and arrows figure.
“There was never any doubt as to my career,” Terry relates. “As a small child, I drew sketches on the wall paper and pilloried unpopular neighbors in chalk on the front steps. Parental efforts at suppressing these tokens of budding genius did not have much effect. Do you remember those old-time little books that children used to slip through rapidly, giving the effect of motion to the pictures on each page? Well, I wasn’t content to look at them. I made them for myself—and that was the beginning of the animated cartoon for me.
SCHOOLED IN SAN FRANCISCO.
“All this was in California. Most of my art training was received at the polytechnic High school in San Francisco, which, by the way, has turned out more successful cartoonists than any other school not specializing in art that I know. I worked on almost all the newspapers on both sides of the bay in the days when camera men and the staff of the art department were one and the same thing. I’ve been a signboard painter and a scene painter, and every bit of that training has been useful.”
Terry’s first plunge into motion pictures was in New York, in 1915, when he gave up his newspaper job and fitted up a studio, because he believed in an idea.
“It took me four months to make my first picture,” he says, “and thank heaven, I sold it! Otherwise I should have been discouraged and quit. Now we turn out a picture a week, and our organization includes 22 men—not to mention the lady. In the beginning, the animated cartoon was a mere novelty. There was so much laborious work and duplication in the tracing that no one man could turn out work fast enough to make any real impression. I had to formulate plans for reducing this mechanical labor, and that is where my knowledge of the camera was invaluable.”
ANTICS NOT SIMPLE.
When you realize that Terry has produced 367 “Fables” and 150 previous pictures in seven and a half years, and that each of these pictures, running to about 700 feet of film and lasting from 10 to 15 minutes, .requires between six and seven thousand separate drawings—16 drawings to the second while in action at an average rate of speed—you will readily believe that the antics of “Henry the Cat” are not so simple as they look.
But all of that is of secondary importance to the finding of the idea behind the picture.
“The idea must have a sustaining interest that will keep it buoyant [sic] for 10 to 16 minutes. It must be capable of comic presentation, and yet it must respond to some fundamental human interest. And it must not be an allustrated [sic] text, but a story that tells itself visually—a pantomime. Our scenarios are not written—they are drawn in rough thumb-nail sketches. Then the characters are drawn to fit. Psychologists tell us our thinking is done in images. In the pictures we keep that direct progress by images, without the intervention of words.
The cartooning of Aesop’s Fables, by which Terry won his fame, was not an accidental inspiration.
“At that time,” he reminds us, “the death of the animated cartoon was predicted in short order. The novelty of mere movement had worn off. The production required a disproportionate amount of labor—as much as a regular comedy. Audiences had grown weary of crude slap stick, and there was no apparent future in the field. It was then that I began casting about for some means of resuscitation. In digging around in the library, I ran across, a book that has retained its popularity for 2600 years, and of which more copies are still sold yearly than of any other publication except the Bible. It deals with strong and permanent human motives, in brief stories. That book was Aesop’s Fables. When we ran out of Aesop, we could do what old Aesop did — turn to and invent some more.
“I wish I could say that one night in the firelight I saw a curly-haired infant on his mother’s knee listening in delight to these immortal stories—and the great idea was born. But there is a fatal obstacle to that. We have no children. Unless,” he adds, “we may lay some claim to those children to whom we owe everything, because they sit in the audience and laugh and clap their hands at our fables. Without them, there would be no ‘Fables Inc.’—and this very clever artist here would be out of a job in the studio, though she’d still have a full-time appointment as Mrs. Paul Terry.

It Sings! It’s Rinso!

There’s nothing like a singing cartoon box of detergent, I always say. The ad’s from 1941 (right click and open in a new window to enlarge).



Notice the fashionable elf boots the box of Rinso is wearing.

120 Years Ago Today

It’s a birthday today. You could have learned to have played the organ from him, like someone did in this newspaper ad from March 12, 1929.



He was with the Kansas City Conservatory of Music and travelled to Iola, Kansas on October 27, 1913 to play at the Conservatory opening there (and made a return engagement in December). ‘A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich and You’ wasn’t in his repertoire yet.



What? You missed the name? Try the last entry on this snippet from 1900 U.S. Census. Click to enlarge.



Yes, Carl W. Stalling would be 120 today.

Stalling’s place in cartoon history should have been cemented by his work on the first Mickey Mouse sound cartoons and Disney’s Silly Symphonys. But it’s been completely overshadowed by his huge body of work at Warner Bros. beginning in 1936 and the influence it had over cartoon scoring at almost every west coast studio. If it weren’t for Stalling, we’d still have cartoons with woodblock clicks when characters walk and the same underscore that only speeds up when characters start running (the type of stuff Norman Spencer hacked out on bar sheets before Stalling replaced him). And if it weren’t for Stalling, would any of us know Raymond Scott?

You’ve seen this before, but why not watch it again? And appreciate what Carl Stalling brought to cartoons. My thanks to Devon Baxter for the link.

Jerry Lewis is On the Air

The last thing I’d want to hear on the radio is someone screeching in a whine or laughing like a gurgling child. But that’s what one station brought listeners, at least for a brief period. For it wasn’t enough for Jerry Lewis to star in films, television and nightclubs. He wanted to star on radio, too. And the easiest way to do it was to buy his own radio station. And that’s what he did.

Of course, Lewis had been on radio before, on NBC in the waning Golden Days. But he was appearing with the unspeakable “M” word (Martin, as in Dean). This time, he substituted another “M” (Moore, as in Del). Like him or hate him—and you can guess my opinion—Lewis was no dummy. There was a perfectly logical reason for him to buy a radio station, even a FM one in the days when rock music never set foot outside the AM band. He revealed it in this syndicated column from December 15, 1960.

Jerry Lewis Tells Why He Bought A Radio Station
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
Hollywood Correspondent
Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
HOLLYWOOD (NEA)—The FCC just made it official.
Jerry Lewis is now a man “locked in” on “12 D. B.’s of whistle woof” to his own FM radio station—KJPL—and broadcasting from his own home.
The JPL means Jerry and Patti Lewis and the $100,000 they paid for controlling interest in the station, formerly called KVFM.
The station’s transmitting tower and official studio are located in San Fernando Valley, but a second studio with sound-mixing control panels Jerry unveiled at his Bel Air home is a junior size Radio City on which he’s invested almost another $100,000.
“RCA ANNEX — The Home Canaveral Sound System.” Jerry called it as he explained his “12 D. B. no bump cycle lock” in words I bet even General Sarnoff doesn’t know.
“You see,” he said, “it has to be a certain DB reading of whistle woof. Like this,” he added, puckering his lips and whistling.
“That’s 12 with no humps,” he assured me. Whistling again, he said:
“That’s not 12. That’s when you are in trouble—see?”
I didn’t see, let alone did I hear any woof. But no one is going to catch me crying woof about Jerry Lewis and his latest “project”.
You have to take his whistle for it along with why he decided to buy a radio station.
“I had to buy one,” he said, “because I never know what time it is.”
NOW THE ESTIMATED 350,000 listeners to KJPL (93.4 [sic] on the dial and heard only locally in San Fernando Valley) often wonder what time it is, not to mention what day it is when Jerry flips the switch at his home.
Without warning, his voice arrives to heckle regular KJPL announcer Del Moore with false time signals and outlandish news and weather reports.
“Just kidding — and with apologies to the FCC,” says Jerry but KJPL listeners are way ahead of him.
Jerry keeps them guessing about the guests he brings to his home microphone. The “Elvis Presley” singing off-key on a recent Sunday afternoon was Pat Boone.
IN ADDITION to being “locked in” to the FM station, Jerry’s elaborate sound and mixing system is linked with the Paramount studio sound department. He can transfer recorded music at his home to sound track film at the studio and he can bring stage dialog from the studio into his home.
Hollywood has laughed about actors saying, “The role is so small I could phone my dialog into the studio.”
But Jerry can do it—and he has.
Several of his off-stage “wild” lines in “Cinderfella,” his latest film, were put on sound track at his studio while Jerry read the lines into his home mike.
“People laughed,” he said, “when I bought a 65 mm. film camera and editing equipment and started making home movies.
Well, that's how I learned how to direct. Now I’m going to learn everything about sound mixing, broadcasting and recording.”
The sound equipment is housed in a new addition to the home he bought from Louis B. Mayer and includes a $30,000 mixer, six coupler transformers in a $10,000 unit and many microphones with individual lines.
“The Home Canaveral Sound System” also includes Jerry’s chatter about “pots” and that whistle woof. If he ever becomes unlocked, look out.

The mention of “Cinderfella” demonstrates another good reason for Lewis to own a radio station—he could give his movies all the free plugs that he wanted, certainly while he was on the air.

Del Moore was part of Lewis’ little company. He started in radio then appeared in several Joe McDoakes shorts with George (Jetson) O’Hanlon. Then came television and he appeared with Betty White in her first sitcom ‘Life With Elizabeth’, then opposite Bob Clampett’s life-sized puppet Willy the Wolf on KTTV. He hooked up with Lewis in ‘Cinderfella’ and later appeared in ‘The Big Mouth,’ ‘The Patsy’ and ‘The Nutty Professor.’ He died in 1970.

(If you want another cartoon connection besides O’Hanlon and Clampett, ‘Cinderfella’ was written and directed by Frank Tashlin).

As for “KJPL,” the call-letters appear to have been a gag. A February 1961 newspaper ad for the Del Moore-Jerry Lewis Show (yes, Del got first billing) revealed the station was still KVFM, 94.3. Their show broadcast “live from their homes” Saturday and Sunday nights, 10 to midnight. How long Lewis remained on the air, or owned the station, isn’t known. He was so busy with films it’s impossible he could have had a show for very long. So his radio station ownership has become an obscure footnote in a long and successful—and controversial—comedy career.