The Fred Allen Show
The Man Behind the Microphone
Fred Allen was not the kind of comedian who coasted. He read nine daily newspapers, had the New York Times flown to the West Coast when he was working in Hollywood, and sat down to write each week's script with a hundred or more notes and clippings spread around his Manhattan apartment — of which perhaps six items survived into the actual broadcast. He put in eighty-hour weeks, working twelve- and fourteen-hour days, and he wrote the final drafts himself even when he had a full writing staff on salary. Arnold Auerbach and Herman Wouk — who would later become famous as the author of The Caine Mutiny — were described at the time as "the most rewritten team in radio," because Allen kept rewriting their drafts anyway.
Auerbach left behind the best portrait of Allen at work: "straight-backed chair at the rickety card table, bespectacled, frowning, intent, wearing an old-fashioned green eyeshade, elastic bands around his sleeves, a bulge of tobacco wadded into his cheek, toiling hour after silent hour." The ritual extended to weekends. On Saturdays Allen sorted the clippings he had carried home in his pockets, choosing five or six for the "newsreel" segment. On Sundays he attended early mass at St. Malachy's Roman Catholic Church — the Actors' Chapel, on West 49th Street, where he had been married and from which he would eventually be buried — and then settled in to write. He also developed a quiet tactic for managing network censors: he inserted "bargaining chip" jokes he never intended to use on air, then agreed to cut them in exchange for keeping the material he actually wanted.
Born John Florence Sullivan in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 31, 1894, Allen lost his mother before he turned three and his father eleven years later. His father had worked as a bookbinder at the Boston Public Library and had gotten him a job there paying twenty cents an hour. By 1912 he was working the New England amateur nights circuit with a promoter named Sam Cohen, performing under a string of names — "Paul Huckle, European Entertainer," then "Fred St. James" (borrowed from a hotel in Bowdoin Square), and eventually "Freddy James, the World's Worst Juggler." He did an Australian tour, picked up a ventriloquist's dummy named Jake, and became "Fred Allen" by accident when a mixup with an old agent named Edgar Allen landed him in a program under that name. He kept it.
He met Portland Hoffa — a chorus girl named for the Oregon city of her birth — during The Passing Show of 1922, worked with her again in The Greenwich Village Follies of 1925–26, and married her in the spring of 1927. She became his radio foil and stooge for the entirety of his broadcasting career, and her weekly line "Shall we go?" eventually became the prompt that launched Allen's Alley — described as "radio's best-known traveling line."
How the Show Took Shape
Allen came to radio in October 1932 with The Linit Bath Club Revue on CBS, a Sunday-night half-hour at nine o'clock sponsored by Linit Bath Soap. He was paid $1,000 a week, out of which he was expected to cover all production costs, including writing. The cast for that first run included torch singer Helen Morgan, impersonator Sheila Barrett, double-talk artist Roy Atwell, tenor Charlie Carlisle, and character actor Jack Smart, with Ken Roberts announcing and Ann Leaf on organ. Allen wrote in his memoir Treadmill to Oblivion that Leaf soloed each week because the sponsor's wife liked organ music, which he compared to "planting a pickle in the center of a chocolate russe." The Linit run lasted six months, ending April 16, 1933.
From there Allen moved to NBC to rescue a failing show sponsored by Hellmann's Mayonnaise, now earning $4,000 a week. The Salad Bowl Revue ran Friday nights at nine through December 1, 1933, when it closed because, as the logic went, mayonnaise was a summer product. Minerva Pious, the ethnic character actress who would eventually become one of the anchors of Allen's Alley, joined the cast during this period. Ferde Grofé led the orchestra. Allen used the run to develop a few formats that would serve him later: an etiquette department to draw mail, a question-box segment, and a "newsreel" piece offering satiric commentary on current events — the earliest version of the topical attack that became his signature.
Before the mayonnaise show even closed, Allen had already auditioned for Sal Hepatica, a Bristol Myers laxative. He came on at 9:30 on Wednesdays as The Sal Hepatica Revue starting January 3, 1934, following the Ipana Troubadors, who had been on NBC for Ipana Toothpaste since 1926 without producing measurable ratings. Bristol Myers turned the full hour over to Allen and renamed it Hour of Smiles — "Ipana for the smile of beauty; Sal Hepatica for the smile of health." Allen disliked the title and wanted something that suggested small-town entertainment. By the end of the 1934 season he had what he wanted: Town Hall Tonight, which debuted July 11, 1934, and ran until the fall of 1939.
Town Hall Tonight and What It Built
Town Hall Tonight was where the show found its form. The format included a "Town Hall Bulletin," a satiric "Town Hall News" segment, a Fred-and-Portland routine, music, dramatic sketches with the Mighty Allen Art Players, and an amateur contest in which listeners mailed in votes and winners were sent to distant cities on Town Hall Tonight road shows. Allen's biographer Robert Taylor identifies actress Ann Sheridan, comedian Garry Moore, and singer Frank Sinatra among the discoveries from that contest. Sinatra was subsequently also discovered by Major Edward Bowes's Original Amateur Hour, which premiered nationally less than four months after Allen's amateur format debuted.
The show broadcast live to the East at 9 p.m. and then live again to the West at midnight. Tiny Ruffner announced in the early seasons; Harry Von Zell took over by January 1936, and simultaneously the theme changed from Smiles to Smile, Darn Ya, Smile. Lennie Hayton led the orchestra in the 1934–35 period; Peter Van Steeden took over thereafter, leading a band that was rechristened the Ipana Troubadors for several seasons. Sylvester "Pat" Weaver produced in the mid-1930s; Vick Knight followed him.
One recurring character from the Town Hall Bulletin was Hodge White, Allen's real friend from Dorchester who ran a grocery store. White never appeared on the program, but Allen's weekly characterizations turned him into a national celebrity of sorts. It was the kind of detail Allen loved — finding comedy in the texture of ordinary life and inflating it just enough to be funny without losing the grain of truth underneath.
The agency handling the show eventually decided the town hall concept had run its course, and in the fall of 1939 the program was renamed The Fred Allen Show. Allen wrote in Treadmill that under the new title, "We became just another group of actors gathered around a microphone in a radio studio." The satiric "Town Hall News" was replaced by the "March of Trivia."
Allen's loosest moments came when the script broke down entirely. On March 20, 1940, falconer Charles Knight appeared on the "People You Don't Expect to Meet" segment with a full-grown golden eagle named Mr. Ramshaw, which promptly flew to the top of the studio and refused to come down. The audience laughed for so long the script was beyond rescue; Harry Von Zell worked the eagle into the Sal Hepatica commercial while Knight tried to lure the bird with raw meat and chicken heads. NBC executives sent a testy letter afterward. The NBC run under this configuration ended June 26, 1940.
The Benny Feud
In 1936, Jack Benny promised his Sunday audiences a performance of "The Bee" on the violin. Allen introduced a ten-year-old violinist named Stuart Canin on his own show to play the piece, then ad-libbed a string of insults aimed at Benny. Benny heard the segment and, by Taylor's account, "burst out laughing" and immediately arranged a retort. His first on-air response came on The Jell-O Program on January 3, 1937. Benny promised to play "The Bee" himself on February 7, but his violin was stolen; he finally played it on February 28. Young Canin appeared as Benny's guest in New York on March 7. The staged "fight of the century" between the two comedians had to be held in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Pierre because no NBC studio was large enough for the crowd it drew.
The feud produced some of the most quoted exchanges in radio history. Allen to Benny: "You couldn't adlib a belch at a Hungarian dinner." Benny's comeback: "You wouldn't dare talk to me that way if my writers were here." When Benny broke into sudden on-air laughter and Allen went off-script with "Laughing at your next Sunday's show already, eh?", Benny replied, "I'd give a thousand dollars if I could think of an answer." Allen recalled in Treadmill that The Jack Benny Program was the highest-rated show in radio when he started the feud. The rivalry transcended format changes and network changes and ran, in various forms, to the end of the network radio era. It extended to film as well: Allen and Benny costarred in Love Thy Neighbor (1940) and reappeared together in It's in the Bag! (1945), making the feud part of two feature pictures. Its riotous coda on radio came in a program titled King for a Day, in which Benny literally loses his pants and Kenny Delmar was cut off mid-sentence as studio laughter ate through the Tenderleaf Tea commercial time.
Allen's Alley
When Texaco became the sponsor in the fall of 1940, the show moved to CBS and was renamed The Texaco Star Theater, running a full hour on Wednesday nights at nine o'clock. The Mighty Allen Art Players became the Texaco Workshop Players; the show opened with a siren and a bell, toned down after December 7, 1941, out of sensitivity to public anxiety over air-raid sirens. Arthur Godfrey served briefly as announcer for six weeks beginning October 1942 but never quite connected with Allen and departed.
Allen's Alley, the format that defined the show's final years, began on December 6, 1942 — though Allen himself considered it "officially opened" on December 13. The premise was simple: Allen and Portland would stroll down an imaginary alley, knocking on doors and posing a question of the week to a roster of comic characters. The traveling theme was East Side, West Side. Early characters included Samson Souse (a drunk), Miss Tallulah Traub, and Miss Prawn. By mid-1943 the lineup included Minerva Pious as Mrs. Pansy Nussbaum, Alan Reed as Falstaff Openshaw, Jack Smart as Senator Bloat, Pat C. Flick as Pablo Itthepitches, Charlie Cantor as Socrates Mulligan, and John Brown as John Doe. The format was modeled partly on newspaper columnist O. O. McIntyre's feature "Thoughts While Strolling."
Hypertension forced Allen off the air after the 1944 season. He returned in October 1945 with a revised Alley: Smart had left for Hollywood, Reed's Falstaff Openshaw was dropped, and the lineup resettled around three characters who became fixtures. Minerva Pious stayed on as Mrs. Nussbaum — the only original Alley character to remain through every incarnation of the segment, and the one Allen praised in Treadmill as "the most accomplished woman dialectician ever to appear in radio." She had first reached Allen on a recommendation from writer Harry Tugend, brought Mrs. Nussbaum to film in It's in the Bag! (1945), and turned up later on The Jack Benny Program. Her broadcast career was sharply curtailed in 1950 when she was listed in the anti-Communist publication Red Channels; her last screen appearance came in 1976, when she revived Mrs. Nussbaum for an episode of Happy Days.
Parker Fennelly took over as Titus Moody, the taciturn New Englander whose catchphrase was "Howdy, bub" — described by Allen as "the finest simulator of New England types we have in radio, the theater, in Hollywood or even in New England." Allen, a Bostonian, admitted in Treadmill that "I liked Titus Moody the best. I had more fun writing his lines and trying to invent things for the old boy to do than I had working on the others." Fennelly, who had begun in the late 1920s playing dry New Englanders alongside Arthur Allen in The Stebbins Boys, eventually rode that archetype into one of television's most durable advertising voices — Pepperidge Farm's spokesman from the late 1950s until 1977, delivering the tagline "Pepperidge Farm remembers."
It was Pious who heard Kenny Delmar doing an impression of a southern blowhard and brought him to Allen's attention. Delmar said the character of Senator Beauregard Claghom was drawn from life: seventeen years earlier, while hitchhiking, he had been picked up by a man who embodied the Dixie zealot. Claghom made his debut on October 5, 1945, with a signature opening — "Somebody, ah say, somebody knocked? … Claghom's the name, Senator Claghom! I'm from the South!" — and was an immediate sensation. Within a month, after perhaps five total minutes of air time, people across the country were doing the voice. Commercial firms produced Claghom shirts and novelty compasses with needles that always pointed south. The Senator's defining trait was his refusal to engage with anything Northern: he would not wear a "Union suit," would not drive through the Lincoln Tunnel, claimed to drink only from Dixie cups, and once rebuked Allen for saying "no" in his presence, since the letters evoke the North. The catchphrases "That's a joke, son!" and "Pay attention now, boy!" became, in the New York Times's phrase, "for many years one of the nation's pet phrases, mimicked by children and businessmen alike." Life magazine, six months after the debut, called Claghom "unquestionably the most quoted man in the nation." Delmar cut two records, I Love You, That Is and That's a Joke, Son, and starred in a 1947 feature film, It's a Joke, Son!, filmed during the previous summer's hiatus. Warner Brothers created the cartoon character Foghorn J. Leghorn based on the Senator — first appearing in the Oscar-nominated Walky Talky Hawky (1946), directed by Robert McKimson — and because the cartoon was copyrighted, Delmar afterward had to ask the studio's permission to perform Claghom anywhere else, a constraint that eventually phased the character out of his act. He carried a reworked version, renamed Senator Hominy Smith, into the 1949–50 Broadway musical Texas, Li'l Darlin'.
The DeMarco Sisters — five siblings tipped to Allen by arranger Gordon Jenkins — became the vocal group for the 1945–49 run, and their cheerfully sung "Mr. Al-len, Mr. Alll-llennnn" turned into one of the show's most familiar opening signatures. In the brief pause that followed, Allen would ad-lib something like, "It isn't the mayor of Anaheim, Azusa, and Cucamonga, kiddies."
The Censorship Wars
Allen's running battle with NBC executives was as much a part of the show as any character in the Alley. He was cut off by the NBC chimes more times than he could count, largely because he over-packed his scripts and let ad-libbing run long. But the censorship fights went beyond clock management.
A Gilbert and Sullivan parody called "The Radio Mikado" contained references to "hucksters of radio" and "vice presidents and clerks" who were "jerks" — the network censored references to the fictional ad agency "Button, Burton, Bitten, and Muchinfuss" and its boss Philmore Updyke Muchinfuss. Allen's view of network executives was encapsulated in the phrase "molehill men": "They came to work every morning at 9 o'clock and found a lot of molehills on their desks; then they had until 5 o'clock to make mountains out of them."
He was not alone in the firing line. Red Skelton was cut off NBC air for saying he'd be careful not to wound an NBC vice president's dignity; on being restored, Skelton said "NBC means Nothing but cuts. Nothing but confusion. Nobody certain." Bob Hope was cut off for saying, "Vegas is the only town in the world where you can get tanned and faded at the same time. Of course, Fred Allen can be faded anytime." When a Dennis Day sitcom delivered the joke "I'm listening to the radio" / "I don't hear anything" / "I know — Fred Allen's on," NBC announced that its comedians were free to say whatever they wanted about each other. Radio Life commented that the resolution didn't matter: "They all were anyway."
The Final Years and What Followed
On February 1, 1948, Allen posted a 28.7 Hooper rating, briefly leading Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, and Fibber McGee and Molly. The reign lasted two weeks. Within a year his rating had crashed to 38th — a fall attributed in large part to Stop the Music, an ABC telephone-giveaway show hosted by Bert Parks that premiered March 21, 1948, and moved directly into the eight o'clock Sunday slot opposite him. Allen famously offered $5,000 in insurance to any listener who missed a Stop the Music call while tuned to his show; he never had to pay. He answered the giveaway craze with a sketch called "Break the Contestant," a parody of Parks's other quiz show Break the Bank in which players had to surrender possessions instead of winning them. None of it worked. Stop the Music climbed from 12.6 in June 1948 to 20.4 by March 1949; Allen's number fell from a season average of 22.7 to 7.9 that March and 5.8 by June. The decisive blow came in late 1948 when CBS Chairman William S. Paley hired Edgar Bergen away from NBC, breaking up the Bergen-Allen Sunday-night tandem that had anchored the audience flow. Allen's sponsor offered to move him to a safer schedule. He refused. The final broadcast came June 26, 1949, with Jack Benny and Henry Morgan as his guests; his network feed was cut off as the show ran long.
After weekly radio, Allen signed an NBC-only contract — many of the network's biggest stars, including Skelton, Benny, and Bergen, had by then been lured to CBS in Paley's talent raids — and joined the supporting cast of The Big Show, NBC's ninety-minute variety showcase starring Tallulah Bankhead, between 1950 and 1952. Television proved less hospitable. He debuted in September 1950 as a rotating host of The Colgate Comedy Hour alongside Eddie Cantor and the team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, but was dropped from the rotation after three months on health grounds. A similar three-month run followed on NBC's Chesterfield Sound Off Time in October 1951. He tried to bring Allen's Alley to television; NBC rejected the project. Goodson-Todman Productions designed three shows for him in three years — Two for the Money (he dropped out after the pilot), Judge for Yourself (one season on NBC, 1953–54, whose concept was overhauled mid-run before it was cancelled), and Take Your Choice (never past pilot). He suffered his first heart attack in 1952 just as another TV series was set to begin. The role that finally fit was as a panelist on CBS's What's My Line?, where he sat alongside Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Dorothy Kilgallen from the fall of 1954 until his death.
Fred Allen died on the night of March 17, 1956, collapsing on West 57th Street during a late-night stroll near a friend's home. A New York Times story the next day claimed he had been walking his dog; biographer Robert Taylor later debunked the detail by noting that Allen had never owned a dog. He was buried alongside Portland Hoffa in section 47 of Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York, with both his real name and his stage name on the headstone. He was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1988, and a pedestrian passageway in the Boston Theater District now carries the name Allen's Alley.
His written legacy was substantial. Allen preserved more than seven hundred of his radio scripts and excerpted them in Treadmill to Oblivion, published by Little, Brown in 1954, illustrated with Al Hirschfeld caricatures, and divided into four sections — In the Beginning, Town Hall Tonight, The New Theme, and Allen's Alley. It remained the best-selling book on radio's classic period for years. His posthumous vaudeville memoir, Much Ado About Me, appeared from the same publisher in 1956; Portland Hoffa saw it through the press. Robert Taylor's biography Fred Allen: His Life and Wit followed in 1989, and Alan Havig's scholarly study Fred Allen's Radio Comedy from Temple University Press in 1990.
The praise that collected around him over the years came from people who knew comedy from the inside. Jack Benny called him "the best wit, the best extemporaneous comedian I know." Edgar Bergen told a Time reporter that Allen was the "greatest living comedian, a wise materialist who exposes and ridicules the pretensions of his times." Time itself described his work as having "an angry big-city clank, a splashy neon idiom, and a sort of 16-cylinder poetry." John Steinbeck, who became Allen's friend and wrote the foreword for his autobiography, called him "unquestionably the best humorist of our time."
Allen himself was characteristically spare about his ambitions. He told a reporter: "I don't want to own anything that won't fit in my coffin." He and Portland Hoffa lived simply in a New York apartment and never owned a car. Comic Steve Allen — no relation — offered what may be the most compact summary: "Fred will last."