“Sometimes I made money ’busking’ at fights. I weighed ’75, ’85 at the time, and what you did busking, you filled in for some guy that didn’t show up, or if there were a bunch of quick knockouts and they wanted to fill out the card. You got paid $2 a round and $5 if you won. For that money, there was no sense in us killing each other, I figured, and before the fight, I’d go to the guy and say, ‘You know, let’s not end up in a hospital.’
“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.
“Four weeks after I started the DuMont show,” Gleason remembers, “I took a broad to Coney Island. We stop at Nathan’s for some dogs, and then we’re walking around. And I notice three, four people staring at me. Then ten, a dozen. Then, out on the boardwalk, there’s maybe 50 of them, and I knew then, the first time, what television was, how powerful it was.” He shakes his head, remembering the moment clearly half a lifetime later. “I also knew that I was never gonna be able to walk around Coney Island with a broad again, maybe the rest of my life.”
Gleason is sitting in the trailer in Riverdale talking and smoking. Art Carney comes in, dressed in the style of the 1920s. Gleason is asked about the young comedians. “Eddie Murphy is a very good comedian,” he says, “but his concert act is frightful. I can’t understand why he thinks he needs all the four-letter words. I don’t think you need it; it gives you easy laughs, a replacement for dropping your pants.” He lights another cigarette. “Murphy has a thing where I do it to Norton!”
Carney says, “I thought we kept that pretty quiet.”
“It was only three times,” Gleason says.
“Seven.”
Deadpan, they go into a riff about great actors they’ve worked with.
“Olivier was the best I ever saw,” Gleason says. “Working with him was a great experience.”
Carney says, “Don’t forget Hobart Bosworth.”
“Or Rex Reed,” says Gleason.
“And Monte Blue, one of the all-time greats.”
Carney says he first saw Gleason at the Roxy in the forties, “doing the pinball thing.” Gleason explains, “The guy comes onstage with a pinball machine, and he moves left, right, the hip, the arms, his back to the audience.” Gleason laughs, remembering the character. Both men say they’d prefer working with a live audience to making movies. “We always performed before a live audience on TV,” Gleason says. “And I think that’s one of the reasons for the show’s success. The audience directs you. There was no stopping, no retakes, no cards. We never stopped.” Why not do theater? Gleason shakes his head. “Nah. Somebody once asked me when I got tired of doing Take Me Along. I said, ‘About twenty minutes after eleven on opening night.’ But also it’s hard with three critics in town, three newspapers. You don’t have a shot. I remember seeing the show about Harrigan and Hart, and saying, ‘This is a hell of a good show.’ They bombed it right out of Broadway.”