Be Sure Every Boy and Girl Reads This Book

In 1934, the Goldsmith Publishing Company of Chicago produced a series of three BLB-format childrens' books featuring the top kid-friendly radio comics of the day, Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor, and Jack Pearl. Goldsmith published a fourth book, Joe Penner's Duck Farm, the following year, just in time to cash in on Joe's meteoric decline which may account for why the book seems to be so scarce today (the others, which reportedly sold in the millions, are fairly common). All four stories were written by juvenile author Harold M. Sherman, a pretty interesting guy in his own right (his career included writing the play Mark Twain and extensive experimentation with ESP) and were supposedly devised with an assist from the stars themselves. This is, of course, unlikely, but the little "memos" (on each star's own stationary) that open and close each story do seem strangely authentic.

Cantor's memos, for instance, are terse and businesslike. I can just imagine some kid in 1934 thinking "This book and story was developed under Eddie Cantor's personal supervision?? Golly!" And as Eddie Cantor in Laughland depicts Eddie as an epoch-shifting godhead, perhaps he did have a hand in it.

Jack Pearl's memos just sound right to me for some reason. Maybe it's the faint eagerness in them and his repeated use of the word "friend". I wonder if Jack used Baron Munchausen stationary for the rest of his life. I'm venturing a "yes". Incidentally, Pearl's radio straightman "Sharlie" is also a character in the book although the real Cliff Hall wasn't used as a model for the illustrations. Also incidentally, I just discovered that every image on Jack Pearl's Wikipedia entry was ripped from this blog. Who knew?

Ed Wynn's memos are purely in character. Note that unlike the others, Ed mentions Howard Sherman by name and gives him credit for the story right away. As the story itself depicts Ed's Fire Chief character as endearingly silly rather than dangerously idiotic, it stands heads and shoulders above the wretched 1933 MGM feature. Given the multiple attempts to create narratives around a "character" (which on radio consisted of nothing more than Ed Wynn wearing a fire helmet) that was merely a nod to Texaco Fire Chief Gasolines, the show's sponsor, I've often wondered what would have happened if another company, say Cliquot Club, had sponsored instead. Would Ed have broadcast dressed as an Eskimo? Would there have been "Ed Wynn, Eskimo" toys, books, and boardgames? Would there have been an awful MGM film, The Eskimo? The mind reels...

Comedy wirelessness

"Funny new show"? Well, one out of three isn't a total loss. Jack "Baron Munchausen" Pearl's 1936-7 series for Raleigh-Kool was, indeed, a show. Ah, I shouldn't be so cruel. This was Pearl's final attempt to retain what little popularity he had left after his 1932-3 pinnacle for Lucky Strike, and it does have its moments. Pearl would work steadily in radio for the next 18 years, but it was all downhill after this. Including the "Vas you dere Sharlie?" tag in the ad was akin to saying "More of the same!", a mistake considering that audiences were not only tired of Pearl's limited bag of tricks, they were about ready to toss over "vaudeville"-style radio and its requisite catchphrase comedy altogether. Pearl's Raleigh-Kool series would last until June 25, 1937 and would be handed over to Tommy Dorsey entirely after Pearl and straightman Cliff Hall, were kicked to the curb. In my humble opinion, Pearl stands as one of the greatest cases of wasted talent in the history of American comedy; probably the finest dialect comic of his time undone by a neurotic adherence to a tired formula that he believed to be the "key" to his success. Pearl desperately needed management he never received. He was doing his Munchausen shtick to the end, closing out his radio career with a quiz show entitled The Baron and the Bee in 1953-4. You can hear a 1937 episode of Pearl's Raleigh-Kool Program for free here courtesy otr-cat.com. Cliff Hall reminds me of a proto-Bud Abbott.

Click thumbnail. No, not that one!
The one on the screen, you fool!

And for your further enjoyment and edification, here is the entirety of the page that ad was culled from. Radio Guide was, of course, the forerunner of TV Guide, and what treasure troves of information these old magazines are, especially for classic comedy obscureologists such as myself! For instance, if it weren't for this particular issue of Radio Guide (week ending Dec 26, 1936), I would never have known that burlesque comic and future kidvid host Pinky Lee was the star comic of Joe Rines' Dress Rehearsal (Sundays at 11:30 AM), thus finally explaining this radio-themed publicity photo of Pinky I found on Ebay a few years ago. What other blog brings you fascinating information like that? Hah?? Damn straight!

"Tonight the show is gonna be different, Graham!"

I’ve written recently about Jack Pearl, “The Baron Munchausen of the Air”, one of the comedians who, along with Joe Penner, Eddie Cantor, and Ed Wynn, dominated American radio in 1932-34. While Pearl may have been a formidable talent, his rigid adherence to a limited characterization and format doomed him to obscurity in the same way that Joe Penner’s over-dependence on silly catchphrases made him the poster child for flash-in-the-pan celebrities. Ed and Eddie, however, fared much better over time. Unlike Pearl and Penner, both had been household names as Broadway celebrities before ever finding fame on radio. Well after the demise of their radio series, Wynn and Cantor found newfound fame on TV in the early 50s, and Ed Wynn even went on to carve out a new career for himself as a character actor. What they shared, and what Pearl and Penner seriously lacked, were stage personalities that came across to listeners as genuine and warm. In contrast, Jack Pearl and Joe Penner performed characters that were markedly artificial, burdened with self-conscious accents or verbal tics. Cantor, especially, eschewed performance gimmicks on radio, preferring to trade, rather, on his public persona as rags-to-riches underdog and incorporating specifics of his personal life into his act, something that made his listeners feel like trusted confidants. For audiences of the early 30s, Ed Wynn represented the best of both worlds; endearingly clownish and unreal and yet, at the same time, compellingly authentic. In actuality, Ed Wynn’s fluttery stage persona was as much a performance as Pearl’s arrogant German adventurer, but so consistent, well-realized, and attractive was Wynn’s “Perfect Fool” that whether or not he behaved similarly in real life was of little consequence to listeners. For the time, they needed to believe in him.

The catalyst for both the first great flowering of American radio and the tremendous popularity enjoyed by Wynn, Cantor, Pearl, et al, was the Great Depression. The nation’s seemingly insatiable hunger for escapist entertainment catapulted comics who specialized in “nut” acts to unprecedented heights of popularity. The sillier and the more outrageous the better, and none was sillier or more accessible than Ed Wynn. Starting in 1932, at 9:30 on Tuesdays, Wynn dominated the airwaves as The Fire Chief on the ultimate escapist radio series of the Depression. His half-hour show was sponsored by Texaco, and his Fire Chief ‘character’ (Wynn wearing a fire chief’s helmet) a tie-in with Texaco’s Fire Chief gasoline brand. There were no stories and, aside from Ed Wynn and his amiable announcer and straightman Graham McNamee, no recurring characters. What the show delivered were jokes and music. The format, which some critics have called crude and which I prefer to view as elegantly simple, consisted of alternating blocs of vaudeville-style patter between Wynn and McNamee and music from the Fire Chief Quartet and Donald Voorhees and the Fire Chief Band. At the show’s conclusion, McNamee would read joke letters to the Chief, asking his advice on anything from anything from the stock market to rare animals. The show, one of the earliest to be broadcast with an audience, began invariably with Wynn emerging from the wings and saying “I’m the Chief again, Graham, and tonight’s program is gonna be different!” It never really was, of course. As soon as the applause had died down, Wynn and McNamee would immediately launch into a routine.

McNamee: Chief, what did you do over the weekend?

Wynn: Oh, I took a vacation! I went down to the Atlantic Ocean, Graham. I had a room facing the ocean: the Pacific. I went on a two-day fishing trip, y’know.

McNamee: Catch any fish, Chief?

Wynn: Oh, well, the first day I was training the fish to eat off the hook, y’know..

McNamee: Any luck the second day?

Wynn: Well. I caught a flounder but I threw it right back, Graham.

McNamee: Why’d you throw a flounder back?

Wynn: (laughs) Well, I didn’t want a fish that had been stepped on, don’t y’see?

McNamee: The oyster season started down there last month, didn’t it, Chief?

Wynn: No, Graham, it started two months ago!

McNamee: You’re wrong, Chief. The oyster season begins in the first month that has an ‘R’ in it.

Wynn: That’s right.

McNamee: That’s September!

Wynn: No! What about R-gust?

McNamee: You can waste time catching your fish, Chief. I’ll buy mine in the market!

Wynn: Well, I’m glad you said ‘market’, Graham. Really, I’ve got a brand new song I want Don to play about the butcher… the market made me think of the butcher song... The name of it is “Butcher Arms Around Me”!

Ed Wynn, who also wrote the series, allowed it to develop organically. Unlike Joe Penner and Jack Pearl's catchphrases, the running gags and catchphrases on Wynn's Fire Chief program were usually the result of natural on-air flubs. Wynn's famous drawn out "so-o-o-o-o-o" line was initially a goof caused by mike fright that Wynn decided to retain because of the huge laugh it received. Likewise, Graham McNamee flubbed one of his Texaco sales pitches and referred to "Fire Chief gasoloon" leading to a long running gag. Also adding to the sense of naturalism on Wynn's show was his apparent impatience with McNamee's Texaco ads, a sentiment probably shared by most of the audience. Wynn would talk through the backgrounds of McNamee's Texaco pitches, interjecting comments such as "oh, there he goes again" and "You just said that, Graham!". Often, a joke would be worked into the sales pitch helping to make the ad more palatable and also to smooth over the transitions.

In 1933, at the peak of his popularity, Ed Wynn was being tuned-in weekly by nearly half of the nation’s total radio audience, numbers beaten only by Amos N’ Andy, also being broadcast by NBC. But by 1935, the series had been cancelled and, for all intents and purposes, Ed Wynn's radio career was finished. Wynn's downfall has often been ascribed to audiences' rapidly changing tastes in comedy. By the time his Fire Chief program ended, America was warming to the character-based situation comedies of Jack Benny which offered not only gags but stories and large casts of characters. Wynn wasn't exactly incapable of making such a transition as he would later prove, but it never even seems to have occurred to him. All three of his 1935-37 follow-up series, Gulliver, Ed Wynn's Grab Bag, and The Perfect Fool, recycled the Fire Chief format of vaudeville patter and music. But just as likely to have killed Ed Wynn's radio career was the then-unknown concept of media saturation. 1933, Wynn's ratings peak, was also the year MGM released the gruelingly unfunny The Chief, starring Wynn and 'based' on the radio series. It was a legendary box office bomb, one of MGM's all-time worst comedies (and that's saying something!). At the same time, Wynn was making news by attempting to start his own radio network to put unemployed actors and actresses to work, a noble cause killed by financial mismanagement. I find it likely that by 1934, changing tastes or not, people were looking for excuses to not listen to Ed Wynn. Eager for something new, they moved on. Ed Wynn, however, couldn't. For Wynn, the latter half of the 30s were the darkest years of his life. Rejected by his audience, his marriage in ruins, and his star descending on Broadway, Wynn sank into a deep depression. A 1944-45 radio series, Happy Island, was an improvement over his previous network failures as it featured stories and a recurring cast of performers (including a young Jim Backus), but it received poor ratings and was off the air after only twenty-six weeks. It would be another four years before Ed Wynn was finally 'rediscovered' by the new medium of television.

To hear an episode of The Texaco Fire-Chief Program starring Ed Wynn for free, visit here.

Jack Pearl, The Baron Munchausen of the Air

Few early American radio comedians shone as brightly and burnt out as quickly as Jack Pearl, aka Baron Munchausen. Pearl rose from stage stardom to radio superstardom to film stardom and back to square one in the space of about three years. Not even Joe Penner, the very definition of a one-note 1930s radio comic, fell as quickly from public favor as Pearl. Previously a multi-talented vaudevillian and Ziegfeld headliner, Jack Pearl's radio notoriety rested on his skillful characterization as Baron Munchausen, the famous German teller of tall tales, and his joke-laden attempts to convince his skeptical stooge Cliff Hall, aka "Charlie", of his exploits were practically Pearl's entire radio act. Following every utterance of disbelief from Hall, the Baron would counter with a stern "Vass you dere, Sharlie?" as in:

BARON: Vunce I vas traveling through the Sahara desert, und I met a man mit two heads!

CLIFF: A man with two heads? That's ridiculous, Baron.

BARON: Vass you dere, Sharlie?

The premise of his 1932-33 series was slight, but it allowed Pearl ample opportunity to display his appealing personality, his skill at dialect, and his razor-sharp timing, no more or less than was demanded of other early radio stars such as Eddie Cantor and Ed Wynn (and Joe Penner got away with even less). In 1933, Jack Pearl's fame had reached such heights that he was summoned to MGM, the most prestigious studio in Hollywood, to star in his first feature, Meet The Baron. MGM, in a radio comedy two-fer, had just recently signed Ed Wynn, also at the peak of his radio fame, to appear in The Chief. Of MGM's two 1933 radio-movies, Meet the Baron is the better. The Chief, as abrasive and contrived a comedy as MGM ever made, was so soundly panned by audiences and critics that Wynn wouldn't appear in another live-action film until The Great Man in 1956. Meet the Baron, on the other hand, had charm and some genuine laughs, easily one of the best comedies MGM made in the early 1930s. Pearl plays the Baron as a phony named Julius who, egged on by his pal Jimmy Durante (a teaming that made sense!), cons his way into a speaking engagement at the all-girl Cuddle College. MGM surrounded Pearl with better known faces such as Edna May Oliver (as the College Dean, naturally), Zasu Pitts (Pearl's love interest), and Ted Healy and his stooges who create havoc as the university's not-so-handymen. Even Pearl's old vaudeville comedy partner Ben Bard appears as "Charlie". Pearl's second starring feature for MGM, Hollywood Party (1934), was a legendary disaster in its own time having been helmed by six different directors with a script that was being rewritten almost daily. It was intended to be MGM's comedy answer to their own all star dramatic feature Grand Hotel (1932), but without a strong narrative thread to hold everything together, the film remains little more than a string of weak comedy blackouts with most of the comedians standing apart from each other (Ted Healy and his stooges and Laurel and Hardy interacting?? The mind reels). This time around, the Baron is genuine and has been summoned by fading jungle movie star Shnarzan (Jimmy Durante) to deliver live lions to his party as a publicity gimmick. The talents of everyone involved are wasted with the exceptions of Laurel and Hardy who were fortunate enough to have brought their own director and material with them from Hal Roach. The film even resorts to near-plagiarism with a scene quite a bit more than inspired by the "Hooray For Captain Spaulding" number from the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers (1930).

Ben Bard and Jack Pearl perform their vaudeville
double act in a DeForest Phonofilm of 1926

After appearing in this critically-denounced curiosity, Pearl returned exclusively to the airwaves where he found himself rapidly fading from favor. By September of 1934, his second series, pulling in half the audience of his first, was cancelled. For the next seventeen years, Pearl would struggle to regain the fame he had enjoyed but to no avail. Although he was never really out of work on radio, new series such as Peter Pfeiffer (1935), Jack and Cliff (1948), and The Baron and the Bee (a Munchausen-themed quiz show, 1952), weren't exactly the kinds of vehicles Pearl needed to make his mark in the new character-driven radio comedy world of Jack Benny and Bob Hope. While Ed Wynn found new fame in the 1950s and Joe Penner continued in B comedies until his death in 1940, Jack Pearl was consigned to the radio doldrums for the rest of his career. Pearl's biggest handicap as a performer was his apparent insecurity. Reluctant to give up a "good thing", he continued to fall back on the "liar and stooge" format even as audiences were tuning him out in droves. He refused to experiment or grow as a comedian believing to the end that his German shtick was the key to his success. In the mid-1930s, Jack Benny himself warned Pearl that he was overusing his catchphrase and suggested he give it a rest for a few weeks. "Are you out of your mind?" replied Pearl. "'Vass you dere' is the biggest thing on my show! The listeners can't wait for it! If I don't do it each time, they'll be disappointed!" Pearl's inflexibility is amply illustrated in a bit of newsreel footage excerpted in Kevin Brownlow and David Gill's 1987 documentary Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow. Likely dating from 1933 when both Keaton and Pearl were under contract at MGM (and sharing Jimmy Durante as co-star), the two comedians appear dockside after an ocean cruise. Pearl is determined to use Buster as his disbelieving stooge in an umpteenth rehashing of his radio shtick, but Buster is having none of it. He deliberately sabotages the bit, apparently after having told Pearl before the camera started rolling that he would play along. Poor Pearl is incapable of recovering after Buster throws him off.

PEARL: Un dere in the middle uv de ocean vas my Aunt Sophie! (waits for straight line, doesn't receive it) Und vat do you think she vas doing there?

KEATON: I haven't the slightest idea...

PEARL: Light-housecleaning! (angrily) Vy don't you say something??

At the end of the clip, Pearl becomes so frustrated that he growls and grabs Buster's face in mock violence. In the coming years, I imagine he felt much the same towards the audience that had deserted him.

Jack Pearl died December 25, 1984.