Comedian Arnold Stang Makes a Spectacle of Himself

So what's to get excited about Arnold Stang? To paraphrase the irrepressible Gerard of the Henry Morgan Show, what's not to get excited?

After all, people constantly are getting excited over the Boston kid who parlayed a feigned Brooklyn accent and a boyhood penchant for comedy into a modest fortune and a bright future that has a long time to burn before reaching peak incandescence. During the past 10 of his 24 years, the anemic looking New England comedian's earnings for milquetoasting on radio and screen narration on Warner-Pathe newsreels have snowballed into a quarter of a million dollars.

Stang answers all fan mail personally. Some fans he keeps. Those are the ones who do not ask for money. He gets lots of letters from incredulous listeners who ask, "Do you look as funny as you sound?" Stang is cagey. He sends a picture of himself, with the note. "Judge for yourself."

Many ask how to break into radio. Apparently, Stang is not appalled by thought of competition. He warns these hopefuls to steer clear of dramatic schools, and advises them to get experience at local radio stations and in little theater groups. Stang got his own early training by playing bench warmer on the Corsairs Athletic and Social Club baseball team in Chelsea. Since, to put it in Stang's own deathless prose, he was "a lousy ballplayer," he had to do something to gain the respect of his fellow Corsairs. So he took to memorizing comedy routines he heard on the radio and regaling the team with his wit.

"It worked out great," Stang recalls. "They could play ball better than I. I could tell jokes better than they."

Stang's humor has improved, and his audiences have multiplied through the years. He owns one of the funniest and most ubiquitous voices on the air. He is perhaps best known and most deservedly celebrated as the hyper-suspicious, delightfully cynical, albeit meek Gerard on the Henry Morgan Show.

His radio performances are legion and legend. His querulous, high-pitched tones have been enlisted by the greatest funnymen of the kilocycles to keep their followers laughing. Some who answer to this roll call, in addition to Morgan, are Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Ed (Archie) Gardner, Alan Young, Milton Berle, Judy Canova, Groucho Marx, Eddie Cantor, Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope, Al Jolson, Frank Fay, Kay Kyser and William Bendix.

Shortly before comedian Jack Paar's half hour on ABC was canceled. he wooed Stang with a $1,000 a week offer to appear on his show for a few minutes each Wednesday night to give it a sorely needed shot in the Hooper. "If I have to mortgage myself, I'll pay you what you want," Paar pleaded.

Stang was flattered, but the offer did not pierce his fidelity to boss Henry Morgan, whose show then rode the same network the same evening at a time when Paar was being ballyhooed as another Morgan -- and Morgan was privately chafing at the similarity between Paar originality and old Morgan scripts.

There's been a steady clamor from Stang addicts for a show of his own. The temptations have been great, but Stang has cautiously resisted rushing in prematurely. He's rejected 30 different program ideas. At one time eight comedy shows were being dangled before him simultaneously, and all he did was shake his rabbit-like head and shrug, "So what's to rush?"

"My own show would need good writing, strong support and a certain warmth," Stang told us some time ago. "I would never try to carry a program by myself. I want a situation comedy, not a gag deal."

Apparently, Stang has finally found what he wants for he is even now busy preparing his "dream show," while continuing his appearances on the Milton Berle and Henry Morgan shows. Another Stang venture will be a lead comedy role in a Broadway musical this season.

Hollywood -- which has had Stang and wants more -- is crazy for him, but he keeps turning down fat paying movie roles because he does not deem them suitable to his personality. He insists upon reading the script before accepting a part. If he had an agent, the agent would need an agent to deal with him.

While Stang was in Hollywood last year with the Henry Morgan show, Eddie Cantor signed him as a supporting comedian. Stang drew a bumper crop of laughs, but he was called on to play a different character each week. Dissatisfied, Stang asked and received from Cantor an "amicable" release. Stang issued a statement: "Due to inability to fulfill a contractual obligation to develop an identifiable character, I have parted company vith Eddie Cantor."

Not only because of contractual ties, but because of warm personal regard, the Boston kid isn't likely to walk out on Henry Morgan. "Henry is one of the most intelligent people I know," Stang avers. "I am most grateful to Henry because he has raised the standard of radio a great deal. He has made sophistication stylish in radio. He has stimulated many others to raise their standards."

Stang was torn almost limb from limb by the three top comedians -- Morgan, Berle and Cantor -- who wanted him on their programs while he was in Hollywood. "It almost killed me," he gasps at the recollection.

His schedule called for appearances on the Eddie Cantor preview in Hollywood on Monday, on the east and west coast editions of the Milton Berle show in New York on Tuesday, on the Henry Morgan show in Hollywood on Wednesday, and on the Eddie Cantor show in Hollywood on Thursday. Midnight Monday, he boarded a plane to New York. In Gotham, he remained long enough to play Berle's psycho-neurotic son on the east coast broadcast and the west coast repeat. With the studio audience still applauding, he raced back to La Guardia Field and hopped a plane that got him to Hollywood late Wednesday afternoon, just in time to answer his cue on the Morgan show.

After three sleepless days, he managed on one instance to induce some shuteye on the flight back to Hollywood. He was asleep 10 minutes when the hostess shook him awake. "Are you really Gerard on the Henry Morgan show?" she wanted to know. From there in, further slumber was out of the question.

Two weeks of that grueling timetable was enough for Stang. Berle had to find himself a less neurotic neurotic. Stang's reluctance to appear in just any movie stems from his burning desire to become the Harold Lloyd both of talking pictures and radio. He has the looks, the ability, the point of view -- and the eyeglasses.

Stang's hobby is collecting lens-less eyeglasses. His collection of more than 100, gathered from the far and far-sighted corners of the myopic world, probably is one of the greatest extant, barring those of optometrists. Stang always is in the market for new additions. Friends dig up odd looking glasses for him. Stang spots specimens himself in pawnshop windows, then bangs the lenses out of them.

His most unusual is a pair of small, round Mother Hubbard spectacles he bought in Boston. His favorite possession is the pair of frames Harold Lloyd wore in the silent films. Lloyd gave them to Stang while producing Seven Days Leave. Stang's ambition is to acquire a pair of Bobby Clark's glasses.

His (Stang's) habit is to keep the cheaters he wears in every picture and play in which he acts. He tags them and tenderly stores them in a drawer. They have become Stang's trademark, along with his never-absent bowtie. He will not perform without them. This caused an impasse when Stang co-starred in the Broadway revival of Sailor Beware in 1943. Stang insisted upon wearing spectacles in the show, and producer Arthur Beckhardt was dead set against the idea.

"Who ever heard of a sailor wearing glasses?" Beckhardt groaned.

The dickering -- and bickering -- continued. Meantime Stang did a benefit at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. At supper, he wrung from the commanding officer an admission that in his outfit there were no less than 30 gobs who wore glasses. The C.O. obligingly gave Stang a note to that effect, and in the face of this evidence, Beckhardt capitulated.

Stang executes his bowtie-and-glasses identity even to the caricature on his letterheads and envelopes. He never has appeared without them, except once when as a joke he wore a long tie for a day. "Nobody noticed it," he confesses.

Among the films in which Stang has garnered additions for his glassless eyeglass collection have been My Sister Eileen, with Rosalind Russell; They Got Me Covered, with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour; Let's Go Steady, with Skinnay Ennis; Hepcats, with Bob Crosby, and Seven Days Leave, in which he was the featured comedian sharing billing with Victor Mature. On the set the two were known as "Mature and Immature."

Stang has been in the boy wonder business a long time. He left Chelsea at 12 when a postcard request won him a New York City radio audition. He used as fare the money he had saved for his mother's wedding anniversary present. Two weeks after the bespectacled urchin stormed Gotham, he was commanding fat checks on The Children's Hour. His mother found the belated gift worth waiting for.

Stang has been in radio ever since. He did not take time out even during school days. He was admitted into Townsend Harris High School in New York, an institution reserved for students with the capacity to absorb four years learning in two or three. Stang eschewed all school dramatics. He was too busy acting for cash on the radio. His extracurricular endeavors had a marked effect on his studies. At the age of 14, Stang won a gold medal for attaining the highest scholastic average in the city.

Stang attributes his proficiency as a laugh-getter to the fact that he approaches comedy as acting, not clowning. For the same reason, he is understandably proud of his little known serious work. He played Spit, the tough young hoodlum in Dead End, on the New York stage and on the air. He portrayed the murderer in radio dramatizations of Ring Lardner's The Haircut twice on the Phillip Morris Playhouse and once on the Great Plays series.

"So what's to be modest?" he asks. "I used to be a pretty darn good actor."

William Tusher in Radio and Television Best, November 1948

Old Time Radio · Arnold Stang · Henry Morgan · Milton Berle · Eddie Cantor · Animation ·

2025/07/11 · Link

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