Jackie Gleason Biography
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Herbert John "Jackie" Gleason (February 26,
1916 - June 24, 1987), nicknamed "The Great One", was a rotund,
Brooklyn-born comedian famous for brash humor and fast ad-libs who
immortalized his Chauncey Street neighborhood in The Honeymooners,
playing bus driver Ralph Kramden alongside his pal and upstairs
neighbor, sewer worker Ed Norton, and their wives Alice Kramden and
Trixie Norton. The foursome were later transplanted into the Stone Age
on the animated cartoon series The Flintstones, the entire show being a
tribute to The Honeymooners, albeit with both couples eventually having
children (Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm).
* * * *
Biography
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Gleason grew up
as an only child, abandoned by his father (probably the reason he never
mentioned Ralph Kramden having a father on The Honeymooners) and raised
by his loving, but work-worn and troubled mother, who died when he was
around 16. Jackie Gleason first gained recognition in the Broadway play
Follow the Girls. He simultaneously appeared in small parts in such
films as Springtime in the Rockies and Navy Blues, but he did not make a
mark in Hollywood in his early years.
In 1949, he played the role of Chester A.
Riley on the short-lived TV comedy The Life of Riley. William Bendix had
originated the role on radio, and Gleason's TV series was unsuccessful (Bendix
himself would star in a later TV version). At the same time, Gleason's
nightclub act was drawing attention from New York City's inner circle.
Gleason was hired as the host of Cavalcade
of Stars, where he originated many of his famous characters and skits,
from 1950 to 1952 on the small DuMont Television Network. The debut of
The Honeymooners came on the "Cavalcade" show of October 5, 1951, with
character actor Pert Kelton in the role of Alice Gibson Kramden, and Art
Carney not as the now-familiar Norton, but playing a neighborhood cop in
a brief sketch. Within a few years, Gleason moved to CBS, retitling his
program The Jackie Gleason Show, which quickly became the number two
television show in the nation behind I Love Lucy. Pert Kelton did not
join Gleason at CBS, which at the time was attributed to health
concerns, but was, in fact, a case of blacklisting during the
anti-Communist McCarthy era. She was replaced in the role of Alice
Kramden by Audrey Meadows, who was much younger and prettier, which
initially caused Gleason to reject her for the role. Meadows then sent
Gleason pictures of herself dressed as a frumpy housewife with no
makeup, and they did not recognize her from her previous audition.
Meadows got the part.
In 1955, Gleason abandoned his live variety
hour for a filmed run of The Honeymooners, which lasted one season.
These episodes have been re-run in syndication for years, and are often
referred to as the Classic 39. These programs were filmed for CBS by
DuMont, Gleason's old network, using a new process called Electronicam,
which allowed the presentation of live television to be preserved on
high-quality film.
Gleason returned to his variety show the
following year, but by 1959, Art Carney had left the show and it had run
out of steam. An abortive attempt at a game show, You're in the Picture,
was a notorious flop, cancelled after the first episode, with Gleason
spending the following week's half-hour delivering a rather funny
apology for the earlier show. Finally, in 1962, Gleason returned to
weekly television with a splashy variety hour entitled Jackie Gleason
and His American Scene Magazine, which lasted four seasons. The show
moved to Miami Beach starting in 1964 (reportedly so that Gleason could
indulge in one of his favorite pastimes, golf, year-round) and was again
called The Jackie Gleason Show for the last four years of its run, which
were in color. Many of these latter shows were full-length hour-long
musical versions of The Honeymooners, some with plots recycled from the
earlier series, and the revamped program (with the added lure of color
television) pushed Gleason's ratings back into the Top Five.
One of his trademark phrases was "How sweet
it is!", uttered during the applause at the opening or closing of his
show. Gleason first said these words during his starring role in the
movie Papa's Delicate Condition, and brought them to television with the
debut of his 1962 American Scene TV series. Another famous Gleason
catch-phrase was "And awa-a-ay we go!", usually said as he ended his
monologue and exited, stage left. In his later years, Gleason often
closed the show by saying, "The Miami Beach audience is the greatest
audience in the world!"
Gleason, employing the same talent and
pathos as he did portraying Ralph Kramden, proved to be an excellent
dramatic actor, and was acclaimed for his live television performances
in The Laugh Maker on CBS' Studio One(where he played a
semi-autobiographical role as fictional TV comedian Jerry Giles), and in
William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, also for CBS as an episode of
the famed anthology series Playhouse 90. He later earned praise for his
portrayal of Minnesota Fats in the 1961 Paul Newman movie The Hustler,
in which he even made his own pool shots. The role earned Gleason an
Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. In the 1970s, Gleason gained
further fame for his portrayal of foul-mouthed Sheriff Buford T. Justice
in the Smokey and the Bandit series of films. Reportedly, Gleason was
also considered for the role of Archie Bunker in Norman Lear's
groundbreaking comedy All in the Family, which occupied the
Saturday-night time slot that Gleason's variety show once held.
Gleason's show was eventually cancelled due
to declining ratings, an aging audience, and the ever-increasing costs
of producing a weekly variety show live-on-tape. In the last original
Honeymooners episode aired on CBS, "Operation Protest," Ralph Kramden
encounters the youth-protest movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The times were changing, and Gleason's program was showing its age. CBS
made sweeping changes in its programming that year, cancelling Ed
Sullivan and Red Skelton in addition to Gleason.
After leaving CBS in 1970, Gleason and his
cohort Carney appeared in several Honeymooners specials on ABC during
the 1970s, and a made-for-television movie, Izzy and Moe. In 1985, three
decades after the debut of the filmed Honeymooners, Gleason revealed
that he had carefully preserved kinescopes of his live 1950s programs in
a vault for future use. The "Lost Episodes," as they came to be called,
first aired on the Showtime cable network and later were syndicated to
local TV stations.
Throughout the 1950s and early '60s,
Gleason enjoyed a secondary career in recorded music, lending his name
to a series of best-selling "mood music" albums for the Capitol Records
label. Although Gleason could not read or write music in a conventional
sense, he was able to compose melodies "in his head" and transpose them
with the help of an able staff. There has been some controversy over the
years as to how much credit Gleason should have received for the
finished product.
Gleason had an interest in the paranormal,
and evidently believed in UFOs, claiming to have seen them himself.
There was even a report that Richard Nixon took Gleason to view the
remains of aliens killed in the crash of a flying saucer, but as this
particular report first appeared in the pages of the National Enquirer,
it is dubious at best.
Jackie Gleason's final role came in the
1986 film Nothing in Common, playing an infirm Archie Bunker-esque
character opposite a young, intense Tom Hanks. It was not widely known
at the time that he himself was fighting cancer of the liver and colon.
Gleason ended up checking himself out of the hospital where he had been
admitted shortly before the end, and died quietly at his Florida home on
June 24, 1987, at the age of 71. That same year, the city of Miami Beach
honored his contributions to the community and local tourism by renaming
the Miami Beach Auditorium, former home of the Gleason show, as the
Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts.
On June 30, 1988, the Sunset Park Bus Depot
in Brooklyn was renamed in honor of the native Brooklynite, becoming the
Jackie Gleason Bus Depot. (Gleason's Ralph Kramden worked for the
fictional Gotham Bus Company.) A statue of Gleason as Ralph Kramden in
his bus driver's uniform was dedicated in August, 2000 in New York City
by the cable TV channel TV Land. The statue is located at 40th Street
and 8th Avenue at the entrance of the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey bus terminal. Another such statue stands at the Academy of
Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in North Hollywood,
California, showing Gleason in his famous "And awa-a-ay we go!" pose.
A television movie called Gleason was aired
by CBS on October 13, 2002, and took a deeper look into the life of
Gleason. While the movie took liberties with some aspects of Gleason's
story, it featured his private life at home (which few people ever got
to see), as well as scenes from backstage at his well-known shows. Brad
Garrett, from Everybody Loves Raymond, portrayed Gleason (after Mark
Addy had to drop out) and Garrett's height (6'9") created some
logistical problems on the sets, which had to be specially made so that
Garrett did not tower over everyone else.
In 2003, after an absence of more than
thirty years, color episodes of The Honeymooners, gleaned from the
1966-70 Miami Beach shows, returned to American television on the Good
Life TV Network. In 2005, a movie version of The Honeymooners appeared
in theatres, with a twist - a primarily African-American cast, headed by
Cedric the Entertainer. This version, however, bore only a passing
resemblance to Gleason's original series and was widely panned by
critics, including WNBC-TV's Jeffrey Lyons.
TV Work
The Life of Riley (1949-1950)
Cavalcade of Stars (host from 1950-1952)
The Jackie Gleason Show (1952-1959)
The Honeymooners (1955-1956)
The Secret World of Eddie Hodges (1960)
(narrator)
You're in the Picture (1961)
The Million Dollar Incident (1961)
Jackie Gleason and His American Scene
Magazine (1962-1966)
The Jackie Gleason Show (1966-1970)
Julie and Jackie: How Sweet Is Is (1974)
The Lucille Ball/Jackie Gleason Special
(1975)
The Honeymooners Second Honeymoon (1976)
(also director)
The Honeymooners Christmas Special (1977)
(also director)
The Honeymooners Valentine Special (1978)
Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson (1983)
Izzy and Moe (1985)
Filmography
Navy Blues (1941)
Steel Against the Sky (1941)
All Through the Night (1942)
Lady Gangster (1942)
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1942)
Larceny, Inc. (1942)
Escape from Crime (1942)
Orchestra Wives (1942)
Springtime in the Rockies (1942)
The Desert Hawk (1950)
The Hustler (1961)
Gigot (1962) (also writer)
Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962)
Papa's Delicate Condition (1963)
Soldier in the Rain (1963)
Skidoo (1968)
How to Commit Marriage (1969)
Don't Drink the Water (1969)
How Do I Love Thee? (1970)
Mr. Billion (1977)
Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
Smokey and the Bandit II (1980)
The Toy (1982)
The Sting II (1983)
Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 (1983)
Nothing in Common (1986)
Stage
Appearances
Keep Off the Grass (1940)
Artists and Models (1943)
Follow the Girls (1944)
Along Fifth Avenue (1949)
Take Me Along (1959)
Record Albums
Music for Lovers Only (1953)
Music, Martinis and Memories (1954)
Lover's Rhapsody (1955)
Music to Make You Misty (1955)
Tawny (1955)
And Awaaay We Go! (1955)
Romantic Jazz (1955)
Music to Remember Her (1955)
Lonesome Echo (1955)
Music to Change Her Mind (1956)
Night Winds (1956)
Merry Christmas (1956)
Music for the Love Hours (1957)
Velvet Brass (1957)
* * * *
The
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URL of Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Gleason
Date Article Copied:
Aug. 26, 2005
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