Piecework

So, in Brooklyn in the fifties, we watched The Honeymooners in a broader context; it was the continuing story of Ralph and Alice, Norton and Trixie, but it was also part of the Gleason legend. We didn’t imagine in those days that The Honeymooners would be with us the rest of our lives. And yet here they are, six nights a week, as constant as the stars (each of the 39 episodes has been played more than 200 times in the New York area). Some of us left Brooklyn, others stayed; we made our lives; but Ralph and Norton remain the same, and we know them better now than we did then.

“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 The Honeymooners that contributed to the show’s durability. “First, it had to be believable,” Gleason says. “Whatever the deal was, you had to believe it could happen. Second, the audience had to know what’s really going on before Ralph does. That was the key to the comedy.”

In addition, each show was classically constructed, with a beginning, middle, and end (“I see stuff now that stops, but doesn’t really end”). The situations were quickly, carefully, and lucidly set up, the characters were clearly defined, and the relationships were held together by a rough kind of love. Ralph really did believe that Alice was the greatest (he would never ever really try to send her to the moon with a haymaker). Alice loved Ralph in the most confident way, unafraid to slam into him, completely aware of his flaws and faults, his insecurities, his boastfulness, his wild-eyed schemes, but equally clear about his strengths, the most important of which was a heart as big as Bensonhurst. They had no kids (except Ralph), a fact that made the relationship more modern than those in most of the kid-littered sitcoms that first showed up in the fifties. And, of course, Ralph and Norton loved each other, too, without ever stating what they felt. They were as dependent upon each other as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whom Ralph, the dreamer, and Norton, the practical man, resemble in other ways.

In his 1956 biography of Gleason, The Golden Ham, Jim Bishop reconstructed the story conference that led to the invention of The Honeymooners:

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 could be a thing.”

“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 Lectures on the English Comic Writers, written in the winter of 1818, there’s a line that’s true of all of us but seems particularly appropriate to Gleason: “To understand or define the ludicrous, we must first know what the serious is.” The serious roots of Gleason’s talent go back to the Brooklyn of his childhood, specifically to Bushwick, which was then an Irish and Italian working-class district.

“Everything happened there,” Gleason says. “Everything.”

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.