So, in Brooklyn in the fifties, we watched
“I guess it lasted for a couple of reasons,” Gleason says. “One, the show was funny. That usually helps. Two, you like the people. If the audience likes you, you’re home free.”
The show was also a triumph of show-business craft. Gleason, with his producer, Jack Philbin, and his crew of writers (Walter Stone, Marvin Marx, Herbert Finn, and others), evolved rules for
In addition, each show was classically constructed, with a beginning, middle, and end (“I see stuff now that stops, but doesn’t really
In his
One afternoon Joe Bigelow and Harry Crane were trying to write a sketch with the star, and Gleason said that he had an idea for a sketch that would revolve around a married couple — a quiet shrewd wife and a loudmouthed husband.
“You got a title for it?” asked Bigelow.
“Wait a minute,” said Crane. “How about The Beast’?”
Jackie got to his feet. “Just a second,” he said. “I always wanted to do this thing, and the man isn’t a beast. The guy really loves this broad. They fight, sure. But they always end in a clinch.”
Bigelow shrugged. “It
“I come from a neighborhood full of that stuff. By the time I was fifteen, I knew every insult in the book.”
“Then let’s try it,” said Bigelow.
“But not The Beast,’ “ said Jackie. “That’s not the title.”
“Why not?”
“It sounds like the husband is doing all the fighting. We need something a little left-handed as a title. You know, this kind of thing can go and go and go.”
“How about The Lovers,’ “ said Harry Crane.
“That’s a little closer, Harry.” Gleason paced the floor. “A little closer, but it could mean that they’re not married. We need something that tells at once that they’re married.”
” The Couple Next Door’?”
“No. How about The Honeymooners’?”
That was it, and, like a great novelist, Gleason reached back into the early years of his life for his characters. They’re still with us; they’re still with Gleason.
“I knew a lot of guys like Ralph,” he says now, “back there, growing up.”
In William Hazlitt’s
“Everything happened there,” Gleason says.
He was born Herbert John Gleason on February 26, 1916, the second child of Herbert Gleason and Mae Kelly. There was a brother eleven years older than Jackie; his name was Clemence, and he died when Jackie was three. Though Jackie has no memory of him, he took his dead brother’s name at confirmation. His father, slim, black-haired, a drinker, worked in the Death Claims Department of the Mutual Life Insurance Company at 20 Nassau Street.