Jack Puts Together His Show

[Yhtapmys]

Screen and Radio Weekly
Serious Side of a Comedian's Trade
By Wood Soanes
[Oakland Tribune, October 6, 1935]
POLITICS, they tell us, breeds strange bedfellows, but no stranger than show business. Take any old-time vaudeville bill with its trained seals and its Lillian Russells. Take any studio with its Arliss' and its Temples.
Even it you limit the discussion to men and women who do the same type of work, curious combinations will arise. One that comes to mind is Reginald Owen and Jack Benny, with whom I talked within an hour on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot in Culver City one overcast morning not so long ago.
Here are two men not only with entirely different backgrounds, but with entirely different habits of thought. Unlike in mind and temperament as they are in face and physique, they are partners in a common cause—dispelling the blues, and it must be admitted that they do their work efficiently.
They have one other thing in common that is most important. They love the theater. I doubt if, cither would put it in so many words. He would try to explain his affection away by a devious route involving the happenstance of employment, the need to keep body and soul together, and the ready money. It is, however, something deeper than that.
Reginald Owen was pestering his father, J. Fenwick Owen of Wheathampstead, England, to let him enroll in Tree's Academy of Dramatic Art when Mayer Kobelsky was passing out the cigars in Waukegan, Ill., in token of the arrival of the son who was to become internationally known as Jack Benny.
By the time young Jack Benny made his debut as a violinist in the old Barriston Theater in the same Waukegan—that was along in 1912—a slightly older Reggie Owen had made his debut in "The Tempest" in His Majesty's Theater in London, had scored a success as Harry Leyton in "The Thief," had done Mr. Darling in "Peter Pan," had played Raymond, the son, in "Madame X," and was at Drury Lane doing Messola in "Ben Hur."
THERE is a period in the youth of every actor when seven years mean a great deal, but the war let Benny catch up with Owen in professional experience. Owen dropped his stage career in 1916 to put in three years of Army life. Benny landed in the Navy when America joined the fray and the Navy decided that he was of greater use as an entertainer than as a deck-swabber.
So while Owen was dodging bullets on the front Benny was improving hit status as a master of ceremonies and entrepreneur by piloting the "Great Lakes Revue" around the Middle West under the sponsorship of the Navy, collecting funds, and doing very well, thank you, for the Navy Relief Society, Liberty loans and kindred projects.
With the war out of the way, Benny had no trouble going on with his chosen career. Neither for that matter did Owen, who promptly appeared in London in 1919 in a play called "In the Night." He might have remained in England had it not been for a bid to come to America as the Prince Albert of "The Swan." That was 11 years ago, and he remained.
I had been having a good deal of trouble with the English actors that are cluttering up M-G-M at the moment, getting an abundance of reticence and a profusion of "Hums" and "Haws" in answer to leading questions, when Owen was listening in, and I expected the worst.
But Owen wasted little time sparring. On the screen he may be the silliest of silly asses when he chooses, but in private life he has a keen wit, a broad knowledge of the world, and pleasing conversational habits. Somehow we got off on the subject of Shakespeare and his recent recognition by the movies. It reminded Owen of his early days in the theater.
"YOU'VE probably never heard of him, unless you're well acquainted in England," he was saying, "but I have a tremendous affection for the late William Poel, who did more than anyone I know for the advancement and restoration of the classics. He was always producing on a shoestring, but, Gad, he did old plays excellently, and he taught us youngsters volumes. And he was years ahead of his time.
"Our crying need, both in England and America, is for dramatic stock as a training school I don't mean stock company work on the screen. That, on the other hand, is one of the chief drawbacks to artistic advancement.
"I refused a contract at Warners for that very reason, and took this part at M-G-M, where there are enough contract players to keep a man from doing bits. I'm a slow worker. I study slowly and I like to build my characters without hurry. I want time to go over all my speeches carefully. Poel taught me that. He was constantly insisting that we ferret out the key words in each speech.
"They are there, if you look for them. Mrs. Fiske knew it. That was why she rould rattle through a speech, in what was a glorified mumble-jumble and still give you the sense of it. This chap, Stepin' Fetchit, it you don't mind my mentioning him in the same breath with Mrs. Fiske, has something of the same system.
IN "Jacob and Esau" I had 80 lines of poetry in one speech. I worked on it assiduously and seemed to get nowhere. I could get the words but the idea wasn't there. And every time I read it, Poel's piercing voice would come over the footlights, "You're disappointing me!" In the end I did not disappoint him. I got what he meant.
"Satisfied with screen work? Yes, it has many compensations. But there is one drawback. Perhaps some day it will be remedied, although I don't know how.
"An actor, for example, who takes his work seriously, studiously builds up a character, not out of so many lines and movements but out of a thousand details. Now then that is photographed, say in 12,000 feet, but it must be cut to 8000 feet. What then? The cutter concerned only with the general picture, slashes a third, retaining what he feels to be most important to the action. He's right enough, but it doesn't tend toward the development of art.
"We need stock companies for the development of actors, and we need a warmer understanding of artistry blended with the mechanics. But we're talking of the millenium, and I've a scene to make with Miss Garbo—I'm her brother in 'Karenina'."
As he turned off to the closed Garbo set, I went along the row of dressing rooms to that of Jack Benny.
INTERVIEWING that gentleman is reminiscent of dying to do interviews with the Four Marx Brothers, Olsen and Johnson or Wheeler and Woolsey. The dressing room is as private as 14th and Broadway.
"I'm afraid I'm going to be a bust as a movie interview—how are things in Oakland, by the way? Lord, it seems a long time since we used to come in through in vaudeville. How is Al Warshamer? A picture house manager, eh? Well, we all come to it. Sold down the river—the river of gold, too. Do you know I was here six weeks twiddling my thumbs before we turned a wheel on 'Melody'?"
"At any rate you had your broadcasts to occupy you," I suggested.
"Occupy is scarcely the word," he continued. "You know there's more psychology needed there than in any other branch of the show business. You not only have to keep up with your audience, you have to keep a couple of jumps ahead of it. We drop every theme and every catchline a week before the audience gets tired of it.
"Our system? Well, it's simple. Harry Conn does most of the work, don't you, Harry. I was afraid you'd agree. You know, one kind word and they want to take three bows. Well, after a broadcast, Harry and I get together and have a chat and maybe hoist a couple. Then he disappears until Thursday. By that time he has a script in the rough.
"Then he and I start to work in earnest. We usually stick at it all day and most of the right. The next morning we have a rehearsal, but a very bad rehearsal, just enough to time the script and space the laughs. He never uses jokes—you know, joke-book jokes—and we rehearse separately, the band in one place, the so-called comedians in another. Mary rarely comes, at all. She likes to sleep in the morning.
"In that way we approach the performance fresh. It keeps it spontaneous. A radio actor, especially a comedian, has two people to please all the time—his sponsor and his audience—and they never want the same thing.
"IF THE sponsor had his way there'd be nothing but music and blurbs. I don't want the laughs myself. If I get two laughs at night myself, I'm set.
"There's a system in that, too. You see the audience never associates me with a character, and after all, it's Benny that the sponsors are selling. Benny is the man in the street, the fellow who's listening to the broadcast. That's one of the things—just one, mind you—that make Ed Wynn the greatest comedian on the air.
"I'm really interested in pictures, though. I feel there's a future in them
for fellows like me, a future that hasn't been plumbed. The radio? The stage? Oh, I'm a glutton. I'd like to keep in all of them."

transcribed by Yhtapmys for release at this more convenient time.

[JohnM]

"I don't want the laughs myself. If I get two laughs at night myself, I'm set.
"There's a system in that, too. You see the audience never associates me with a character, and after all, it's Benny that the sponsors are selling. Benny is the man in the street, the fellow who's listening to the broadcast."

Wow. That's one of the big conclusions made in modern analyses of his work, and he was consciously working it in 1935.