Harry Conn

[LLeff]

I was just sorting some copies I've made over the past few days, and a number of them included prominent mentions of Harry Conn. One Jack/Mary trade ad says boldly at the bottom "Harry Conn is the ONLY writer I employ". (Actually, I think this wasn't exactly true, because Boasberg was punching up scripts for him.)

(For the uninitiated: Harry Conn was Jack's writer in vaudeville and for the radio show through very early 1936 when he quit town leaving Jack without a script for his next show, claiming insufficient credit and that without him, Jack was nothing. Jack had refused his request for a raise. He was soon replaced by Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow, who stayed with Jack through 1943.)

But there are lots of examples where Jack was giving very, very prominent credit to Harry Conn for being his writer. And I stumbled onto Jack's 1932 clipping scrapbook (be still, my heart) that shows what a phenomena Jack was almost right from the start. Now, maybe he wasn't saving any BAD press that he was getting, but the volume of positive stuff for the Canada Dry program even from June and July of 1932 is tremendous. But back to Conn, I've never seen a comedian give so much public appreciation and praise to any writers, let alone ONE SINGLE MAN as the brains behind the words that were making the country laugh.

Several items say that Conn was the highest paid writer in radio at the time. So taking all this into account, I think Harry Conn must have been so full of himself that I don't know how his head was able to fit through a door. Talk about hubris. This has always been the basic premise of the story behind the Conn split, but seeing all this public credit to Conn and that he was the highest paid writer already just drives the point home for me of how ridiculous Conn's assertions were.

[shimp scrampi]

There's also the anecdote that Conn's wife cattily remarked to Mary on seeing her in a new fur coat "My husband's brains paid for that coat!".

It's amazing, and a tribute to Jack, that this early generosity-rearing-up-to-bite-you-on-the-backside incident didn't put him off continuing to constantly give credit to others for his success. According to Milt Josefsberg, he even frequently paid a destitute Harry Conn handsomely for lousy, mostly unusued material much later. Also according to Josefsberg, Jack never spoke unkindly of Conn at all.

[LLeff]

According to Milt Josefsberg, he even frequently paid a destitute Harry Conn handsomely for lousy, mostly unusued material much later. Also according to Josefsberg, Jack never spoke unkindly of Conn at all.

Very true. And another thing I've discovered is the continuing use of the Chicken Sisters act on stage. In the early days of Radio (1932-34) when Jack was also making all those stage appearances at theatre (5 times a day! Whew!), the bit of the Chicken Sisters was frequently included...even to having them as a "featured headliner" alongside other performers. I found several pictures from those early stage shows, and there she is...Mary Kelly playing the "larger than life" sister.

Fast-forward to Jack's stage and Vegas/Tahoe appearances of the 60s and 70s. Scanning the scripts, the bit is still used quite regularly (of course, evolving to the Landrews Sisters and then the Smothers Sisters). I haven't calculated it precisely, but I'd guess that it shows up in probably 40% of the stage (i.e., non-symphonic) shows of that time.

What other comedian today could get so much mileage out of one bit? Is Gallagher even still doing the Sledge-O-Matic?

[shimp scrampi]

I found several pictures from those early stage shows, and there she is...Mary Kelly playing the "larger than life" sister.

Now that's interesting. So how much time really elapsed between the end of Jack and Mary Kelly's relationship and the "reunion" incident where Jack was saddened to see that Mary Kelly had let herself go and fallen on hard times? I was under the impression that was quite a bit later, not the few years this would suggest.

[LLeff]

Now that's interesting. So how much time really elapsed between the end of Jack and Mary Kelly's relationship and the "reunion" incident where Jack was saddened to see that Mary Kelly had let herself go and fallen on hard times? I was under the impression that was quite a bit later, not the few years this would suggest.

As best as I can tell, Jack and Mary Kelly broke up in 1926. The standard story is that he married Sadye on the rebound. I'm still working on pinning down a date when the Chicken Sisters bit started on stage. However, it first appeared on radio on 2/4/34, which was also Mary Kelly's first appearance on Jack's radio show. The earliest date in which the bit was "headling" (that I've found so far) is 1/11/34. It's possible that they were doing it on stage earlier but not listing it as a separate act.

[shimp scrampi]

Interesting article on Al Boasberg here, but there is a sidebar on Harry Conn that sheds more light on the subject. I am amazed at the guy's hubris in confronting Jack's father. It would be interesting to see that fiery telegram from Jack!

http://www.wga.org/WrittenBy/0402/boasberg.html

[Roman]

The article is no longer on the web. However, it's been cached. Very interesting piece about the beginning of Jack's success.

The Man Who
Invented Jack Benny
How gag man Al Boasberg helped create
the greatest comedians of the 20th century.
And how credit eluded him.

Written by Ben Schwartz
(From the April 2002 issue of "Written By")

Al Boasberg and Jack Benny shook hands for the last time June 16, 1937. The writer and the comedian had known each other nearly 15 years. Although never close friends, the two shared an inseparable comic sensibility that had defined Benny's career.

That day they didn't talk jokes. Boasberg's contract was up, and Benny wanted him back. And Boasberg was in a position to deal. His return to the Benny show (joining first-time writers Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow) had cemented Benny's hold on the number-one spot and brought the show to a creative peak, the year it became the show we remember today. At its center was the character seemingly inexhaustible in its nuance, variation, and exasperating lack of self-awareness: Jack Benny.

Besides Benny, Boasberg's A Day at the Races opened that same week to large box-office returns. If you asked the Marx Brothers, that was due to Boasberg. "He was a comic genius," said Groucho Marx. If they didn't tell you, Boasberg would himself. He had to--he wrote the number-one radio show and number-one movie in the country and received no credit.

During the '30s, screen credit was not an automatic clause in a writer's contract and was often given arbitrarily. When the Screen Writers Guild achieved its first contract with the principal motion & picture companies in 1942 (backdated to 1940), the heart of the agreement was the union's right to determine onscreen writing credit. It was a matter of industry practice, however, that gag writers and those hired to punch up scripts were not named along with the narrative screenwriters. "It's their job to write the script," Boasberg said of such situations. "It's mine to make it funny."

"He wrote the first joke I ever used, way back in vaudeville," Benny said. Benny bought that joke for $25. He now offered Boasberg $1,500 a week for, potentially, nothing. "All he'd have to do was look at what we had written, and if he thought it was fine, he didn't have to write a word," Benny recalled, "but either way, I paid him."

Fifteen hundred dollars a week for nothing wasn't a bad job during the Depression (Beloin and Morrow made $450 combined). They shook hands, and Boasberg brought home that week's script to start work. At about 1:30 a.m. he awoke. He took a few steps from bed, then collapsed, and died from a massive coronary. He was 45 years old.

Touring Company Purgatory

To say that Jack Benny the actor was nothing like Jack Benny the character has become cliché. He was not cheap, vain, dumb, or boastful. The character was fiction. And fiction requires a writer.

Benny and Boasberg first met around 1923. They had one important thing in common, comedian Phil Baker. For Boasberg, Baker had been his entrée into writing vaudeville. For Benny, Baker was a comic inspiration and an albatross around his neck.

Benny first spotted Baker in 1920. Benny, 26, billed himself "Ben K. Benny: Fun With a Fiddle." Baker played accordion, and his flippant, smart-ass style floored Benny, who soon openly copied him. One critic noted in March 1920: "Ben K. Benny says that he is the brother of Phil Baker, who was here last week. And since he is quite as amusing as Baker and has all his tricks of voice and expression, why dispute him?"

Benny also took note of Baker's stooge, Jojo, an audience plant. Jojo interrupted Baker, begging to sign with him and then belted out mangled Yiddish versions of hit songs: "He would always have somebody working with him to get the laughs," said Benny years later, "like I do on television."

If Baker never complained publicly, his ex-partner and mentor did. Violin-comic Ben Bernie had a big problem with violin-comic Ben Benny lifting their style. Bernie sent a cease-and-desist letter, and Ben Benny soon became Jack Benny. Worse, in January 1921, Variety labeled Benny a copycat and weak violinist. Benny's bookings fell by half. He knew he had to reinvent himself, but not being a writer, Benny dipped even further into Baker's act by hiring a singer to interrupt him. Until 1923, that was Jack Benny's act.

While Benny toured comedy purgatory, Al Boasberg was anchored to his own piece of it in Buffalo, New York, in Murray Whiteman's music shop. A high school dropout with dreams of acting, he once hooked a part in a traveling vaudeville sketch, "Love in the Suburbs." He had one line, consisting of one word. Upon seeing the show, his father, Herman, reportedly offered to double his son's salary if he'd skip the Buffalo show. Boasberg was soon out, finding he had little acting talent.

At 31, tall and lanky, Boasberg had a deadpan demeanor, which only made his endlessly absurd conversation funnier. A lazy, unmotivated clerk, he often pompously critiqued Whiteman's sheet music. "The song sells a million," scoffed Whiteman, "and you know what is wrong with it?"

Whiteman and Herman were friends, so it was hard to fire Boasberg--but it was tempting. He let pals hang out at the shop and ignored regulars to schmooze touring vaudevillians who stopped in for new music. He loved trading quips with the pros. Some asked to use the lines onstage. Others paid $5.

At the urging of friends, he wrote down three pages of jokes and tried them on Phil Baker. Boasberg left that meeting with $100 in his pocket. By 1923, he was in Manhattan.

Rewriting Comedy
"He made me." --Phil Baker on Al Boasberg

If Benny suffered from the Baker connection, Boasberg rode it. Baker hired Sid Silvers as a new stooge, and Boasberg rewrote him from a lovable goof into a maddening half-wit who nearly heckled Baker off the stage. That it happened to a wiseguy like Baker only made it funnier, and the act killed.

Irving Berlin soon cast Baker in his 1923 Music Box Revue, an elegant showcase that debuted Robert Benchley's "Treasurer's Report" and sketches by George Kaufman. Comedy was moving past the baggy pants era into a subtler humor, and Boasberg had created something distinctive. He had rewritten the sacred relationship between comic and stooge, between first and second banana. As Brooks Atkinson noted in the New York Times, "Unlike most jealous and temperamental artistes of the revue stage, Mr. Baker yields most of the laughs to his box heckler ... Mr. Silvers does not have to hang his head for shame like most of the humiliated 'feeders' in comedy teams."

That shift became Boasberg's trademark. Ben Bernie, then forming a dance band, hired Boasberg, who turned Bernie's musicans into a band of grousing hecklers. For George Burns and Gracie Allen, Boasberg wrote "Lamb Chops," wherein Burns finally gave up as the comic and let Gracie go. Like Baker, Burns now found himself helpless before a presumed half-wit. They jumped from openers to headliners within a year. Boasberg's act "Guilty!" for the comedy debut of 16-year-old Milton Berle opened with Berle denying he stole material (and then making it clear he did). The bit stuck, to say the least. A Boasberg comic didn't just tell jokes--he became the joke, the fall guy.

And in years to come, Jack Benny became the biggest fall guy of all.

Inventing Stand-up

By vaudeville standards, Benny was a limited talent. He didn't look funny, sound funny, sing funny, dance funny, juggle funny, wear blackface, know rope tricks, or work with an animal. He didn't even fall down. What he did well was talk.

Boasberg had limits too. He was a goldmine of gags and a genius at defining comics, but writing a full play was beyond him. "I wouldn't have given him 10 cents to sit down and write me a script," said Benny, "even if I told him what I wanted. He just wasn't the man for that."

Boasberg's first major collaboration with Benny debuted in the 1924-25 season. It boldly turned their limits into strengths. Critics sniped at Benny's lifting, stale jokes, crude violin work, and sometimes sloppy appearance. Boasberg and Benny answered all of it. It came to a boil in Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, Pennsylvania, in early 1925.

Benny now entered in a nice suit or a tux, a statement in itself to his working-class audiences. He couldn't bear going on without his violin, but it moved from the act's center to a mere prop. For material, Boasberg broke the act down to just jokes, setting Benny apart from any other monologist in the business. Monologists then considered jokes as filler between long shaggy dog stories or recitations of famous works. No, Benny just stood there and told jokes. Thus, the folks in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre got a look at something brand new--a stand-up comic.

Benny and Boasberg were moving comedy in a momentous way, from the purely physical to the purely conceptual. Comedians no longer needed music, make-up, slapstick, stooges, or anything else but words. That is, writing.

Boasberg's "Jack Benny" was something more complex than Baker's wise guy. Benny told stories of dates, relatives, and his life in show business, but there was a smug blindness to him now. "How's the show going?" Benny snootily asked the house band leader. "Fine," came the reply. "Well I'll fix that!" snorted the comic.

The act deconstructed Benny's stuffed shirt presence. We could see Benny's smarmy ego at work even if he could not. It was a quality not far removed from the full-of-himself Boasberg of Whiteman's music shop, the failed actor pontificating on pop music.

Benny left the stage deflated, a buffoon. And now he was a cheap one, too. George Burns recalled one joke Benny liked at the time about one of his dates. "I offered to buy her dinner," Benny said. "She was so excited she dropped her tray!"

Together, they crafted Benny's basic character. In April 1925, Benny played the Palace, vaudeville's premier theater, and placed trade ads thanking "My Doctor, Al Boasberg." That ad is Boasberg's first known public credit.

Boasberg brought Benny to a new level. J.J. Shubert cast Benny in "The Great Temptations" and Benny emceed the Palace regularly. He soon married Sadie Marks (aka Mary Benny), and made a comfortable niche for himself in the big time.

A man in a suit telling you jokes about his life--that was Benny's act. In the decades to come, how many thousands of stand-up comics would use this as the basis of their act? The lifter, the copycat, old cease-and-desist Benny would become the most imitated comic of all time.

Tackling Hollywood

In 1925, Buster Keaton hired Boasberg for Battling Butler (wherein Boasberg plays a bandleader) and The General. After starting at the top, however, Boasberg found that physical comedy wasn't his forte; his movie work was limited to writing title cards on silents like Ladies Night in a Turkish Bath. And if Benny found stability, Boasberg went through a second divorce (wife number one deserted him), married again months later, and his father died while the two weren't speaking.

Boasberg still cabled Benny new gags, but four years went by before they collaborated again. With talkies in, MGM wanted a vaudeville show on screen. They asked Benny to emcee Hollywood Revue of 1929, and Benny called Boasberg.

Touted as a top New York writer, Boasberg had come out West but soon found L.A. cool to him. In Hollywood Revue, Boasberg again uses Benny to reflect his own life. Thus, Benny spends his screen time acting out that alienation. A movie actor jibes Benny as a haughty New York stage snob. He punctuates lines by snapping buttons off Benny's tux and ripping his shirt down the middle. Benny introduces his co-host as a close, personal friend, but forgets the man's name. Benny claims himself a ladies' man, but every woman he flirts with slaps him. He takes it on the chin from the cast as a self-important showbiz poser, an outsider, and a loser with women. It's the part Benny played perfectly for decades, the part the deadpan Boasberg lived.

Hollywood Revue hit, and Boasberg's movie career took off. He wrote Buster Keaton's first sound films, Free and Easy and Doughboys, two hits. They lead to an RKO production deal. Benny, however, quickly found that few movies need an emcee and went back to New York.

Boasberg's studio deal was short-lived. He brought RKO 12 properties of which RKO bought four. Boasberg then sold the other eight to rival studios. Realizing they had a man on the payroll twice as productive for the competition, they handed Boasberg his hat.

MGM put him on the horror film Freaks, hoping he might lighten it with funny dialogue and blackout gags. One Boasberg suggestion MGM didn't use was that during filming, studio executives should wear ID badges--so as not to be confused with the film's cast.

Boasberg was a nameless, if highly paid, gag man again. And that wasn't enough.

Calling on Radio

In 1932 Boasberg went East for Bob Hope. From 1929-1932 he wrote Hope's act, reshaping Hope's raw talent into a headliner (even arranging Hope's first screen test). LIke Benny, Hope became a fall guy, the punchline to his own joke. The New Yorker's Robert Benchley called Hope a comic in "the Baker-Bernie school," and the New York Times of May 30, 1932, saw Hope and Boasberg as a "dizzy partnership."

Still, vaudeville was on its last legs. Benny was angling for the new medium of radio rather than go back. He landed a guest shot on Ed Sullivan's show, hoping to use it as an audition for a program Canada Dry was planning. As he had at each critical juncture in his career, he called Boasberg.

"Hello, folks," Benny said to listeners, "This is Jack Benny talking. There will now be a slight pause while you say, 'Who Cares?'" Benny aficionados cite Boasberg's opener as classic Benny, but that what followed was out of character. True, for the later Benny, but it's completely in character for two disgruntled vaudevillians wincing over Hollywood. Boasberg simply handed Benny scenes from his own life, writing him as a frustrated screenwriter and failed actor.

"There is quite a lot of money in writing for the pictures," Benny said, "Well there would be, if I could sell one." Benny then brags about his part in a new Garbo film, playing a body found dead in a bathtub. "It's sort of a mystery show," Benny said, playing on the old Saturday night bath joke. "I'm found in the bathtub on a Wednesday night."

Benny's Garbo movie harks back to Boasberg's one-line, one-word part in "Love in the Suburbs." Benny doesn't even get the one word.

The spot got Benny his Canada Dry show, which premiered May 2, 1932. Benny introduced bands, cracked jokes, and read commercials. He brought Boasberg, and they transferred their act to radio. But neither came away thrilled. Benny wanted more than jokes to sustain his character. "Gags die," he would say, "Humor doesn't."

Boasberg wanted more than jokes, too. While writing Benny's show, he placed a full-page ad in Variety, headlined: "Radio! We Are Here!" Announcing his own company, he offered sponsors a "comprehensive plan" to create, write, cast and produce programs. But sponsors wanted stars, not writers, and radio, like movies, soon ran on a star system.

Boasberg the producer went broke as Boasberg the gag man got rich. Moving into the Edison Hotel off Times Square, he made $50,000 in 1932 writing radio. He finally got on-air credit (once) on The Lucky Strike Show. That was such a noteworthy event that Variety wrote it up as news.

Benny's show struggled. Phil Baker's ex-partner, Sid Silvers, was hired as a writer-stooge. But backstage bickering between Silvers and the Bennys, Silvers and other writers, the Bennys and Canada Dry, and the confused feel of the show lead Canada Dry to cancel by 1933.

Struggling for Credit

Boasberg and Benny worked apart until 1936. Boasberg returned to movies. He wrote on 14 features and shorts (directing most of the shorts) and wrote and directed Myrt and Marge, a poorly received Three Stooges feature that effectively ended his directing career. And he still smarted over not getting credit on A Night at the Opera. Knowing how he felt, the Marxes sent Boasberg an autographed 8x10, inscribed: "To our pal _________, Sorry but we couldn't get your name on this picture either."

Boasberg hoped for better on A Day at the Races, which he wrote with George Seaton and Robert Pirosh. Then Benny called.

Benny was now radio's biggest star. Boasberg's replacement, Harry Conn, made Boasberg's Hollywood Revue concept a weekly occurrence, turning Benny's announcer, bandleader, singer, and Mary into recurring characters. Conn said: "Right now most of the big comedy programs are using the group, the family style, which it so happens [I] originated. The group formula is good because whereas a monologist has to tell stories, and dialogue has to tell jokes, group comedy permits use of situations ...". In short, Harry Conn invented the sit-com. But Benny and Conn split over Conn's demand for credit. Benny needed writers for the 1936-37 season and asked Boasberg to work with two novices, Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow. Accounts vary over what Boasberg did. Some say he only "spiked" scripts at Sunday cast readings. Yet, certain shows had him working on scripts quite early in the week, and told stories that could only have come from his life, so he wasn't just coming in for Sunday punch-up.

The season opened with Phil Harris and his band joining the cast, written as just the sort of loud, grumbling, hard-drinking musicians Boasberg had written for Ben Bernie. Boasberg's Buck Benny sketches debuted in November, parodying Western cowboy serials. Freelancers knew Boasberg was in charge of those sketches, which inspired a movie, Buck Benny Rides Again, and a sandwich, still on the menu at Canter's deli today.

Then, in January 1937, Benny's friend Fred Allen insulted Benny's violin skills on the air. Benny answered, igniting the classic Fred Allen-Jack Benny mock feud. What happened next was the sort of real-life comic chemistry that made Boasberg and Benny's relationship so unique.

Fighting the Battle

Across town, MGM issued writing credits for Races, placing Boasberg's name first. Boasberg appreciated that, but not sharing credit with two novices (like on Benny's show). He asked for sole credit on the comedy scenes, arguing Seaton and Pirosh should get credit for the screenplay (that is, the dull love story). Under Motion Picture Academy guidelines for musicals, this was technically possible. But MGM felt that anyone going to a Marx Brothers picture was going for the comedy and that Boasberg asked too much. (Privately, so did Groucho.)

The credit battle that ensued was angry and mean. In short, every time Boasberg complained, MGM demoted him in the credits. Furious, Boasberg threatened to "go on national radio and tell the whole world the truth about A Day at the Races."

Boasberg never made good on that, but he knew a guy who could. Both his real feud and the Benny-Allen comedy feud reached their climax the weekend of March 14, 1937. Behind the scenes, Boasberg flew into tirades over A Day at the Races. He cabled his attorney, Martin Gang, to remove his name completely from Races. His ego allowed for all or nothing, and MGM complied--he received nothing.

On the air, the Benny show degenerated into a lengthy exchange of insults. "Why you fugitive from a Ripley cartoon ... I'll knock you flatter than the first eight minutes of this program," sniped Allen. "You ought to do well in pictures, Mr. Allen, now that Boris Karloff is back in England," sniffed Benny. "Why if I was a horse, a pony even, and found out that any part of my tail was used in your violin bow I'd hang my head in my oatbag from then on," said Allen. Eventually, they went out in the hall for a fist fight as the band played "Love and Learn."

In the end Benny and Allen laughed it off. Boasberg, who never laughed much anyway, swore never to work in movies again.

Losing the War

A Day at the Races opened that June, a smash. MGM placed a 13-page ad in the June 16th Daily Variety. Full pages ran thanking each Marx, Margaret Dumont, director Sam Wood, Seaton, Pirosh, and the film's choreographer, but not one word about Al Boasberg.

The same day MGM ran its ad, Boasberg and Benny met for the last time. With movies, plays, directing, producing, and acting closed off to him, Boasberg resigned himself to his well-heeled fate: Jack Benny's gag man.

And so they shook hands. Boasberg took home that week's script. It had a familiar ring. A gloating Benny lands a role in a movie, only to find he's been given a one-line, one-word part. Worse, he has to speak it from inside a barrel. It was "Love in the Suburbs" again, Boasberg's first failure haunting his last. That script also introduced the world to the most beloved, heckling stooge in the Benny show history--the miser's valet, Rochester.

That night, Boasberg collapsed and died from his heart attack.

"Forty-five years old," Benny sighed, "what a helluva loss he was." Benny made no mention of Boasberg's passing on the final shows of the season. But he spoke at Boasberg's memorial service, calling him "the greatest gag man who ever lived."

Jack Benny and his writers continued successfully for decades without Al Boasberg. But Benny's formative years with Boasberg created the character from which it all flowed. They invested it with the funniest, saddest qualities of both their lives, and the truth of it echoed with audiences for years.

[Roman]

I think the fact that Harry Conn had no writing credits to his name after his parting from Jack (at least according to the Internet Movie Database) and that Jack's show became FAR FAR better after Conn departed says all we need to know about Harry Conn's comedic gifts. Jack Benny carried Harry Conn, not vice versa.