Piecework

“Then one night I was in Chicago. Actually, Cicero, where I was playing the 606 Club. I went over to the arena. Anyway, I was fighting some guy named O’Connor, and I go in and hug the guy, and he steps back and gives me a rap. I say, ‘What’s this? I thought we . . .’ And he says, ^CF- you!’ “ Gleason fingers a scar on his brow. “He gave me this. And that was the end of busking. I was cut, my teeth were loose, I’d had it.” He smiles. “Fighting’s not that hard. It’s going out the dressing-room door that’s murder.”

The goal was always Manhattan, and the village that was then called Broadway. By 1939, the closest he’d come was playing a place that was always called “the ever popular” Queens Terrace, under the el in Woodside. Gleason now had a personal manager named Willie Webber, and after much pleading, Webber talked Fred Lamb of the Club 18 (across the street from “21”) to come out to Queens and look at his new kid. Lamb was impressed, and brought Gleason into the Club 18 on January 20, 1940, for $75 a week. This was what is called a tough room, but after the free-for-all of the Club Miami, Gleason was ready, holding his own with Pat Harrington, Jack White, and Frankie Hyers, the mad comics who were the club’s regulars. One night, Jack Warner came in, saw Gleason, and signed him for Warner Bros, at $250 a week.

“I never expected anything from Hollywood,” Gleason remembers. “I had no idea of becoming a big star, having a big picture career. I was a kid, I was having a lot of fun, and they were paying me $250 a week in the Depression! Not bad.” His first movie was Navy Blues. “It had Jack Oakie, Jack Haley, Jack Carson, me, and Ann Sheridan, some of the worst drinkers in the history of show business. Now, across the street from Warners was a joint called My Blue Heaven. And every day when they wrapped, there was a stampede across the street. I mean, a stampede! I mean, these were drinkers!”

There were a few more now-forgotten movies, but Gleason kept busy working at Slapsie Maxie’s, then a wild club in Hollywood fronted by former light-heavyweight champion Maxie Rosenbloom. And he continued learning, studying the craft of making movies, discovering his strengths and limitations in front of an audience. Most of all, he learned to trust his own instincts.

“I never did a lot of analyzing,” he says now. “It was funny or it wasn’t. Once you start analyzing it, the mechanics and all that, you’re through. It’s instinctive. That’s why a comedian can be a serious actor, maybe a great actor, but I never heard of an actor becoming a great comedian.”

Gleason was turned down for army service (badly healed broken arm, ioo pounds overweight), shuttled back and forth between the coasts. He was separated from his wife, and in New York lived at the Astor or the Edison and did his drinking in Toots Shor’s. There were a lot of women. “They were all wonderful,” he says. “At one time, I was working at Billy Rose’s and there were 22 girls in the chorus and all you had to do was say, ‘Would you care to have dinner?’

“Gleason also started working in theater; there was a flop called Keep Off the Grass, with Jimmy Durante and Jane Froman; another turkey called The Duchess Misbehaves, in which Gleason played, of all things, the painter Goya. He worked awhile in Hellzapoppin, did a memorable Foreign Legion bit in Along Fifth Avenue, and then in 1945 was in a smash hit, Follow the Girls. I have a friend who was at this show on V-E Day, 1945, ^and ^s^^esavs> “It was the most insane evening in the theater I’ve ever spent.”

In 1949, television called for the first time, and he took the role that eventually would go to William Bendix in The Life of Riley. It was the wrong part at the wrong time, and after one season the sponsors canceled. Gleason went back to the clubs. “Who the hell knew what television was?” he says. “Nobody.”

He was working in Slapsie Maxie’s in June 1950 when the call came from DuMont. This was the fourth television network, and the only one to go out of business. A man named Milton Douglas was producing a weekly variety show called Cavalcade of Stars, with rotating hosts, and he offered Gleason two weeks as host for $750 a week. Gleason, who doesn’t fly, refused to cross the country for two weeks at $750; he insisted on four weeks. Douglas sighed, and agreed. Gleason took the Super Chief back to New York. He was 34 years old, a bouncer, braggart, pool hustler, failed husband, loudmouth, boozer, squanderer of money and time, a failed movie actor, a middle-level nightclub act, a mediocre radio performer. He was all these things, and when he walked into the studios at DuMont, he was ready. The four weeks became twenty years. From DuMont, he went to CBS, and in one form or another, he was a regular performer on television until 1970.