My Friend Irma

How It Got on the Air

My Friend Irma didn't start life the usual way. In the mid-1940s, advertising agencies typically packaged radio shows and brought them to networks with sponsors already attached. CBS president Bill Paley, trying to chip away at NBC's stranglehold on comedy — NBC held eleven of the top fifteen rated shows at the time — tasked his own staff with developing new programming in-house, then finding buyers. The result was one of the most durable comedies the network ever produced.

The man behind it was Cy Howard, born Seymour Horowitz in Milwaukee in 1915. Howard had written jokes for Danny Thomas, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, and Bert Lahr before landing at CBS in 1946 with the concept already in his head. His background was unusual for a radio producer: he'd been a tennis champion at the University of Wisconsin, earned an economics degree from Minnesota, and even appeared on Broadway in 1944. He described himself as a reformed introvert, and he believed, above almost everything else, that casting would make or break the show.

He found his Jane Stacy almost by accident. Cathy Lewis came in to audition and was visibly impatient to leave for her next appointment. Her first words were "All right, all right, five minutes, that's all" — and that combination of exasperation and efficiency convinced Howard she was exactly right. For the title role, Howard had seen Marie Wilson in Ken Murray's Blackouts, where she was doing something quite different from Irma. But a specific quality of naive bewilderment came through, and Howard knew he had his girl.

CBS premiered My Friend Irma on Friday, April 11, 1947, at 10:30 p.m., right after the quiz show It Pays To Be Ignorant. Within two months, Lever Brothers had bought it for Swan Soap at $6,250 a week plus $10,000 for airtime. It replaced The Joan Davis Show on Monday, June 30, 1947, and Lever Brothers slotted it alongside Lux Radio Theater and Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts to form a two-hour Monday-night block — a package CBS claimed cost the sponsor only one dollar for every 400 homes reached. Variety's review of the premiere called it "the top comedy show developed this year."

There was one legal cloud early on. In 1946, writer Arthur Kurlan had worked with CBS on a radio adaptation of the play and film My Sister Eileen; when that project collapsed, My Friend Irma was created in its place. Kurlan noticed the resemblance and, four days after one of the final sustaining episodes aired in June 1947, sued CBS for $150,000, charging breach of contract, plagiarism, and infringement of his rights. He ultimately received a settlement.

The Characters

The premise was simple and the comedy came entirely from character. Irma Peterson, played by Wilson, was a stenographer from Minnesota in her mid-twenties — cheerful, friendly, and operating at a remove from ordinary logic that was hard to define but immediately recognizable. A Time critic in October 1947 placed the show in the "artfully stumbling footsteps of Gracie Allen, Jane Ace, and other attractive dunderheads," but Irma was her own thing: she had neither the malapropian quality of Jane Ace nor the dubiously screwy logic of Gracie Allen. What she had was naive friendliness and a blue-eyed innocence that Wilson conveyed entirely through voice.

Jane Stacy, her roommate and best friend, narrated the stories with weary resignation — exasperated but devoted. Jane carried an unrequited romantic interest in her millionaire boss, Richard Rhinelander III, played by Leif Erickson, while spending much of her energy trying to discourage Irma's relationship with Al, played by John Brown. Al was, as the show established him, a Brooklyn hustler barely on the right side of the law who hadn't held a job in years and harbored get-rich-quick schemes. His plan, more or less openly stated, was to marry Irma so she could support him. His weekly greeting to her was "Hi-ya, Chicken."

Upstairs lived Professor Kropotkin, a violinist at the Paradise Burlesque, played by Hans Conried. His entrance never varied: a soft knock, then, in a sheepish Russian accent, "It's only me, Professor Kropotkin." He carried on a perpetual battle of insults with their landlady, Mrs. O'Reilly — Gloria Gordon for most of the run, described as a fierce Irish battleaxe. Alan Reed played Irma's boss, Mr. Clyde. The show's announcer for Swan Soap segments specifically was Frank Bingman; other announcers over the run included Carl Caruso and Bob LeMond. Lud Gluskin led the orchestra, and the theme was Cole Porter's "Friendship," with Alfred Newman's "Street Scene" serving as the midbreak bridge.

Marie Wilson and Cathy Lewis

The show turned on the pairing of Wilson and Lewis, and Variety's premiere review caught it right away, calling their teamup potentially "radio's standout femme comedy duo." Wilson, born Katherine Elizabeth Wilson in Anaheim in 1916, had been working in films since 1934 — more than forty of them over her career — and had spent roughly seven years in Ken Murray's Blackouts. She held three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for radio, television, and film. But she was also, by most accounts, genuinely not far from the character she played. Radio Life wrote: "She has that same touching sincerity, the same steady wide-eyed gaze, she can keep an admirable poker face through the most idiotic conversations.... She loves everything and everybody, and there isn't a person in the world that she doesn't call honey with sincerest regard." Howard himself said, "She's so much like Irma that I have to rewrite the things she says to make them believable."

The role had consequences for Wilson's career. She lost the part of Billie Dawn in the 1950 film Born Yesterday to Judy Holliday — a particular disappointment — and found herself typecast in ways that were difficult to escape. Critics and colleagues constantly compared her to Irma. She later performed the Billie Dawn role in summer stock. She died in 1972 at fifty-six, and Charles Tranberg published a biography of her, Not So Dumb: The Life and Career of Marie Wilson, in 2007.

Cathy Lewis — born Catherine Lee Lewis in Spokane in 1916 — came to the show as one of Hollywood's busiest radio actresses, having appeared in over 120 episodes of Suspense alone. She was known in radio circles as "Mrs. Radio," in part because of her marriage to actor-producer Elliott Lewis. She and Wilson became close friends during the run; Lewis called Wilson "Cookie." When Lewis left the television version in 1953, described as overworked and tired of the role, CBS decided not to recast Jane Stacy because the part was too closely identified with her. Instead, the character was written out of both the radio and television shows — sent off to live in Panama. Irma's new roommate, Kay Foster, played by Mary Shipp, moved in with her young nephew Bobby. Lewis later played the recurring role of Deirdre Baxter Thompson, the snobbish sister-in-law, on Hazel from 1961 to 1965. She died in 1968 at fifty-one.

Ratings, Sponsors, and the Film That Launched Martin and Lewis

The ratings held up across the run. Almost from the debut the show appeared regularly in the Hooper and Nielsen top fifteen, and World Radio History credits it with four consecutive top-ten seasons for CBS. The Hooper rating peaked at over 20. Lever Brothers sponsored it through 1951 for Swan Soap — Irma would typically slip in a silly remark working the product name in, which became a running bit in itself. From 1951 to 1952, the sponsor was Ennds Chlorophyl Tablets, promoted as stopping "Triple O—odors of body, odors of breath, odor offense." Camel Cigarettes took over from 1952 to 1953, followed by various sponsors through the end of the run in August 1954.

In 1949, producer Hal B. Wallis brought the show to Paramount Pictures. Wilson reprised her role, and the film was directed by George Marshall. The project had actually been discussed as early as a few months after the debut — Hal Roach's studio had been interested — but those talks fell apart, and it took two years before the Paramount version happened. Filming ran from February through April 1949, and the film premiered in New York on September 28, 1949. The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called it "a very dopey film" while flagging the arrival of "a new mad comedian, Jerry Lewis." Variety said the most notable value of the film was the introduction of two nightclub comics — Martin and Lewis, who were paid ten percent of the film's budget as their combined salary. Jerry Lewis had originally been cast as Al but was judged wrong for the part after the first day of screen tests; fearing he'd be cut from the film entirely, he came up with the idea of playing a comic sidekick, and the character Seymour was written in. Hans Conried took over the role of Professor Kropotkin in the film after the original casting, Felix Bressart, died during production. A sequel, My Friend Irma Goes West, followed in 1950 — the only sequel Martin and Lewis ever made.

The Franchise and the End of the Run

The show spread well past radio. The CBS television version launched January 8, 1952, and ran two seasons; it was the first series telecast from CBS Television City in Hollywood when that facility opened in October 1952. The television run is almost entirely lost — only three episodes survive as kinescopes. A My Friend Irma comic strip, illustrated by Jack Seidel, began syndication in September 1950. By 1951, Dan DeCarlo was drawing it with Stan Lee writing, though the strip ended around mid-1952. Atlas Comics — later Marvel — published a My Friend Irma comic book series running 46 issues from June 1950 through February 1955, with Lee writing most of them and DeCarlo providing covers and interior art throughout. DeCarlo's style on the series is noted as a precursor to the look he would later bring to Archie Comics. A stage play appeared in 1951 as well. Andrew Pepoy, writing in Hogan's Alley magazine, described the early 1950s as a period when "My Friend Irma was everywhere, blaring from radios, causing lines at movie theatres, flickering on early televisions and shining brightly on the newsstands."

In 1953, Hans Conried left the radio show and was replaced by Kenny Delmar, who played a new character — Kropotkin's cousin, Maestro Wanderkin. The radio run ended August 23, 1954. Cy Howard, who had signed a fresh five-year CBS deal back in September 1948, went on to win a 1969 Primetime Emmy for writing on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, sharing the award with a group that included Steve Martin. He later directed the ensemble comedy Lovers and Other Strangers in 1970 and died in Los Angeles in 1993. Of the more than 315 episodes broadcast over seven years, approximately 98 are known to survive in recordings.