Easy Aces
How It Started at a Card Table
Easy Aces didn't begin with a network deal or a carefully pitched concept. It started on August 1, 1930, when Goodman Ace was doing film reviews on Kansas City's KMBC — a segment billed as "The Movie Man" — earning ten dollars a week to supplement the seventy-five he made as a movie and theater critic for the Kansas City Post. One night, the act scheduled after his segment failed to show up. Ace improvised by calling his wife Jane into the studio, and the two of them talked through a bridge game they'd played the night before — one connected, loosely, to a local murder in which a woman had killed her husband over a hand of cards. Ace told Jane, as he later reconstructed for Jerome Beatty of American Magazine: "You be dumb. I'll try to explain the finer points of bridge, and why murder is sometimes justified."
The mail response was strong enough that the station gave them two regular slots a week at thirty dollars. Early episodes stayed close to the bridge table, but the show soon shifted to domestic comedy built around Jane's verbal accidents and the improbable situations that surrounded them. An advertising man spotted the act and brought them to Chicago in 1931 for a thirteen-week CBS tryout broadcast from WBBM. The salary negotiation became part of family lore: when the sponsor proposed a trial basis with pay contingent on ratings, it was Jane — not Goodman — who insisted on five hundred dollars a week and no less. To everyone's surprise, the sponsor agreed. What few listeners knew was that Jane had no acting experience or training of any kind; Goodman wouldn't reveal that fact publicly until many years after the show ended.
Jane and Her Malapropisms
The show was billed as "radio's laugh novelty," and the novelty was Jane. She became known as Mrs. Malaprop of the air — a reference to the character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's eighteenth-century play who garbled phrases with cheerful confidence. Jane Ace did the same thing in a twangy midwestern voice that had something in common with Bernardine Flynn's Sade Gook on Vic and Sade. The malapropisms were the engine of the comedy, and Goodman Ace worked them carefully, aiming to dovetail each episode's wordplay into one closing punch line, to which he would react with "Isn't that awful?"
The list of Jane's mangled expressions was long and genuinely inventive. She said "time wounds all heels" and "familiarity breeds attempts." She talked about "working my head to the bone" and described Congress as "still in season." She said "go in one year and out the other," "you hit the nail right on the thumb," and "monotonize the conversation." She called herself a "totalitarian" when she meant teetotaler. Other Jane-isms passed into circulation: "I am his awfully-wedded wife," "up at the crank of dawn," "I look like the wrath of grapes," "he blew up higher than a hall," "perish forbid!" Radio critic John Crosby once observed that Jane "is a rather difficult conversationalist because she is either three jumps ahead or three long strides behind the person she is conversing with." She called her bridge partner Marge her "insufferable friend," and she navigated card games with a personal system: always lead with the first card on the right side of the hand.
Goodman Ace was never quite the straight man in the traditional sense. His wit ran sharp and dry — the kind of wit that observers placed alongside Fred Allen and Henry Morgan, aimed at an audience that appreciated the intelligence behind the joke. (Allen himself once called Ace "America's greatest wit.") He played himself in the show, always known simply as "Ace," never using his first name on air. The broadcasts had a deliberately loose feel: the cast sat around an old card table fitted with a concealed built-in microphone, performed live without an audience in an isolated studio, and Ace allowed only one script reading before each broadcast, to keep things from going stale.
The Cast and the Way It Ran
Through the 1930–45 run, the recurring cast around the Aces included Mary Hunter as Jane's friend Marge — a part Hunter landed after Ace walked through WGN, heard her giggle at a receptionist's desk, and hired her on the spot. Marge was written as a boarder in the Ace household. Peggy Allenby played Mrs. Benton. By 1939, the cast had grown to include Ethel Blume as Betty, Alfred Ryder as Carl, Martin Gabel as the newspaper reporter Neil Williams (introduced as Marge's boyfriend), Helene Dumas as Laura the maid, and Ann Thomas as Miss Thomas. Ford Bond was the announcer throughout those years. The theme that opened and closed the show was "Manhattan Serenade."
Storylines often ran across multiple episodes in serial fashion. A long arc broadcast across late 1935 and early 1936 sent the Aces out of town to the Southwest after Goodman was tricked into becoming an unwitting silent partner in a crooked real estate scheme run by a corrupt alderman; reporter Neil Williams took over as the lead character for weeks while friends and family read cards and letters from the absent Aces. Typical storylines were smaller — Jane called for jury duty, or muscling her way into Ace's real estate business — but the willingness to disappear the stars for a month suggests how much faith Ace had in his bench.
The show moved networks several times over its run: CBS through January 1935, NBC's Red and then Blue networks through October 1942, back to CBS through January 1945. Sponsors included Lavoris, Jad Salts, and then Anacin for a long stretch beginning in 1935. The format was fifteen minutes, three times a week, for most of that run, expanding to thirty minutes on Wednesdays in late 1943.
Low Ratings and the Anacin Incident
Easy Aces never had strong ratings. Crossley numbers sat in the mediocre five-to-seven range throughout the run. Ace knew it, accepted it, and made it part of his public identity. Every year he placed an ad in the trade press that essentially mocked his own audience size, noting that his listeners never answered the telephone while the show was on. He listed his personal "never-haves": never having changed announcers, never been asked for an autograph, never won a radio popularity poll, never had a script returned for changes.
The show lasted more than fifteen years on those unremarkable numbers, which says something about how much Ace's writing was valued by people inside the industry, if not always reflected in the surveys. The end, when it came, arrived in an unlikely way. Ace had spent years avoiding personal contact with the makers of Anacin. In 1944, an Anacin spokesman took issue with a musical bridge Ace was using in the show. Ace responded in writing, criticizing the company's practice of using cardboard boxes instead of tin — calling it a "gyp." After fourteen years together, Anacin canceled the show.
It turned out to be a good career move. Ace went on to become one of radio's highest-paid writers at thirty-five hundred dollars a week, working on The Danny Kaye Show until the series moved from New York to the West Coast. He sold roughly 1,300 transcriptions of old Easy Aces episodes to the Frederick Ziv Company for syndication; about a hundred stations signed on, earning Ace around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. In syndication, the show reached more listeners than it ever had as a live broadcast. In August 1946, Ace joined CBS as "supervisor of comedy and variety," running what amounted to a school for young comedy writers — a group of six or seven he described as wanting "to make all that easy money." Several of them went on to substantial careers, including George Axelrod (The Seven Year Itch) and Neil Simon. While at CBS, Ace also conceived and helped develop a show that reenacted historical events as if covered by a modern radio news team — a program that eventually became You Are There, though for years the official credit went to a CBS executive vice president rather than to Ace.
The Return: Mr. Ace & Jane
In 1948, Ace came back to the microphone with a revived version of the show, this time titled — in his own deliberately peculiar styling — "mr. ace & JANE." The setup had changed: now Ace played an advertising man living in what the show called "the typical little eastern town known as New York," with a neighbor who happened to be a radio announcer. Announcer Ken Roberts played the neighbor in addition to handling the regular announcing duties, which set up a running gag in which Jane asked for his autograph every time they met. The cast also included John Griggs, Evelyn Varden, Pert Kelton, Eric Dressler, and Cliff Hall. "Manhattan Serenade" remained the theme.
The first sponsor was the U.S. Army and Air Force Recruiting Service, which created an unexpected problem when a congressman complained that Ace's scripts — particularly the courtroom scenes featuring Jane before eccentric judges — were promoting disrespect for the judiciary. Ace responded by self-censoring his material, and by fall 1948 the show had moved to a more conventional sponsor in General Foods. The recurring characters included Ace's boss, described as a man with "a child for every occasion," and Jane's brother Paul, who hadn't worked in twelve years "because he's waiting for the dollar to settle down." The fourth episode carried an extremely long parodic title that worked in a Hooper rating of 4.6 — Ace's sense of humor about his own commercial standing still very much intact.
Afterlife
The revival ran through December 31, 1948, with the Aces billed this time as "radio's original comedy couple." That wasn't quite the end. A DuMont television version of Easy Aces ran from December 1949 through June 1950, with each episode opening on the couple watching television and then commenting on what they saw — John Crosby noted that the TV show "doesn't resemble the Easy Aces of radio very closely." Goodman went on to a long second act as head writer for some of television's biggest variety hours: The Big Show with Tallulah Bankhead, The Milton Berle Show, and Perry Como's programs for roughly twelve years through 1966. He wrote a Saturday Review column called "Top of My Head" that ran until 1980, and in 1970 he published Ladies and Gentlemen — Easy Aces, a collection of eight complete radio scripts named for the show's standard introduction.
Goodman Ace — known as "Goody" to friends, described as lanky and professorial — and Jane Ace, who had cream-colored blond hair and an infectious smile, were inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1990. Jane had died in New York on November 11, 1974, of cancer; Goodman wrote a eulogy for her in the Saturday Review that drew hundreds of letters from readers and old radio fans. He followed her on March 25, 1982. They are buried together at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Raytown, near the Kansas City where two ten-dollar appearances on KMBC had launched everything more than fifty years before.