When “Our Miss Brooks” made the transition from radio to television the entire cast made the jump–except for one.

At the time, Jeff Chandler, who played the role of Mr. Boynton–Connie Brooks’ timid love interest– was becoming a major movie star. Although, Ms. Arden says he was sentimental and hated to leave the show his time could stretch only so far.

In addition, it was felt that his “macho” appearance didn’t lend itself to a visual portrayal of the Boynton character who had to be handsome and manly while portray shyness and diffidence.

But then they found Robert Rockwell. His portrayal of Phillip Boynton caused viewers to accept the fact that this good-looking man could also be timid and reluctant while occasionally displaying enough of a spark of interest in Connie Brooks to keep her hopes alive.

Ironically, because of his identification with the role and his excellent job in portraying the character Rockwell became so identified with the role of Mr. Boynton that other roles, particularly dramatic ones, were often denied him.

Success in a role sometimes brings typecasting.

Still, he had a fifty-year acting career, appeared in over 350 television shows and on stage. Perhaps his greatest role on stage was playing opposite José Ferrer in the 1946 Broadway production of Cyrano de Bergerac. As an interesting footnote, he played Superman’s father Jor-El.

When “Our Miss Brooks” made the transition from radio to television, Eve Arden says there was no problem with the supply of scripts. She says they had a backlog which could easily be translated to the new visual medium.

But there was a problem with the cast.

At the time, Jeff Chandler, who played the role of Mr. Boynton–Connie Brooks’ timid love interest– was becoming a major movie star. Although, Ms. Arden says he was sentimental and hated to leave the show his time could stretch only so far.

Ms Arden tells also of an unexpected incident which occurred when she and Mr Chandler parted.

“One day after a radio taping of ‘Miss Brooks,’ Jeff Chandler took my hand and pulled me back into the studio as the others left. I looked at him questioningly, as Brooks {Arden’s husband] was outside waiting for me. Jeff had been seeing Annie Sheridan since he’d broken up with his wife. I was fond of both of them, and with my matchmaking tendencies, I’d been very happy for them.

“Only in pictures am I prepared for the unexpected, and when Jeff kept holding my hand and said that he had to tell me that he was very much in love with me, I’m sure I stood there with my mouth wide open. Maybe that’s why I was always the girlfriend of the heroine. I’m sure that heroines, even if they’re married, have hormones that quicken and react properly when told that someone is ‘in love’ with them. Not Evie the one-man-on-her-mind-at-a-time girl. I think I mumbled something about ‘not knowing what to say’ and left poor Jeff feeling foolish, but somehow we parted friends–why was it only in the movies that I said all those clever things?” ( from Three Phases of Eve: An Autobiography )

Hey, that’s what puts the “show” in “Show Business.”

As frequently happened in television of the 1950’s, hit programs were translated from radio. Sometimes this process led to a continuation of the show’s popularity. Sometimes the program were broadcast in both mediums for a time. This category of articles will deal with the shows that made the transition successfully and those that didn’t, and the changes made in the translation.

There were often cast changes made necessary due to the visual nature of television, just as there were decades earlier when movies added sound. Not every silent screen star had the voice needed for sound. By the same token, not every fine radio voice was possessed by an actor with the expected physical presence.

For example, William Conrad, known for the TV show “Cannon” previously played the part of Matt Dillon in the radio version of Gunsmoke. While not as rotund as he later appeared later he was still not fit the producers’ visual concept of Matt Dillon. Instead they asked John Wayne who turned it down but recommended a young James Arness.

Bud Collyer, who later hosted “Beat the Clock” and “To Tell The Truth”, played the role of Superman/Clark Kent in the Superman radio show. Despite his beautiful baritone voice–which he could modulate from a higher tone for the part of Clark to a deeper resonance for Superman, his slender frame did not lend itself to the role. Besides, who can imagine Superman–or even the mild-mannered reporter for a metropolitan newspaper, Clark Kent, wearing a bow tie?

When Eve Arden was first asked to read a script for the show by the producers Harry Ackerman and Hubbell Robinson she wasn’t too interested in reading it nor in doing radio, and they sensed her reluctance. However, they told her that the writers, Al Lewis and Joe Quillan were very good and would have a new script for her soon.

A week later she met with Ackerman and read the new script. This time she was impressed and remarked that she even “laughed out loud” while reading it. There was one problem remaining, however. She had a full summer planned with her children. Countering her objections, she was told that if she could tape the thirteen scripts before she left, that would be fine.

The episodes were taped, she headed off for Connecticut and thought no more of it. The show began as a summer replacement and soon after Ms Arden got a call from Frank Stanton, who was then president of CBS.

When she answered the phone, Stanton said, “Congratulations!”

“For what?”, she asked.

Stanton answered, “‘Miss Brooks’ is the number 1 program on the air.”

And so, a new chapter in Eve Arden’s life had begun.

The little routines within each show, as well as the closing routine at the end, are what made the George Burns/Gracie Allen show so enjoyable.  Whatever the silly plot was, the vaudeville, stand-up comic bits made it worth watching for me.

Each one gave Gracie (the character–not the actress) an opportunity to display her ditzy humor.  My favorites were those in which she displayed what I call her “illogical logic.”

A couple of examples might do better to show what I mean than what I’ve said so far:

George is–typically–asking Gracie about one of her relatives.  She mentions an aunt, let’s say (I’ve forgotten), who is having a problem with the thermostat on her oven. She can’t control the temperature so she keeps burning the cakes she bakes.

George asks what did she do about that?

Gracie replies that her aunt decided to bake a very small cake every time she baked a full  size one.

“How would that help?”, Georges asks.

Gracie answers, “Well, when the small cake was burned, the big cake was done.”

(If I need to explain it I’ve either done a poor job of relating it or perhaps you’re not a fan of Gracie’s humor.)

Another example:

One of Gracie’s relatives is a guide in a museum. The tour party comes to a table on which sit two skulls: one smaller one and one larger one.

Her relative, the tour guide, points to the larger skull and says, “And this is the skull of the famous Aztec leader, Montezuma.”

Someone asks Gracie’s relative about the smaller skull, “Whose skull is that?”

The reply comes, “That is the skull of Montezuma when he was a child.”

More difficult than explaining a joke is relating in print a routine that should best be seen and heard.  Such is the case here. However, those of you who really appreciated George and Gracie together can probably picture in your mind each example given here as if it were playing before your eyes and ears.

Andy Taylor and Barney Fife were close friends in the fictional world of Mayberry. It turns out that the actors who portrayed them were close friends as well.

According to Don Knotts, “Andy was a good boss and one of the reasons the show had such good rapport. Andy was simply a good guy.”

Knotts attended the weekly script meetings at the insistence of Griffith.  Andy reserved a chair next to him for Don and would tell any would-be interloper, “You have to get up. That’s Don’s chair.” Even after he left the show Don’s chair was never used again.

Later, Griffith had the chair bronzed and sent to Knotts as a gift.  Don said of the gift, “It was so heavy you could hardly pick the thing up.”

The mutual respect and good rapport among the cast and crew established by Andy Griffith was often mentioned as the foundation that made it possible to maintain the quality of the show throughout its run.

The late Jack Dodson, who played Howard Sprague, tells a story of something interesting he found when he was first cast on The Andy Griffith Show.

He says that the first time he was on the back lot, which was known as the Forty Acres, he went wandering around. “I had nothing to do for a couple of hours,” he said, “and I turned a corner and thought, ‘God, that building looks familiar.’ So I went inside and I saw all these burlap packs with shovels and cooking pots made out of rubber, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute. This is the train station form Gone with the Wind. It had never been used since then because there were still props left inside. Shovels, rifles with rubber bayonets on the end, and even the dummies they used for the bodies.”

Fascinating!

Jack Benny’s mincing walk occasionally caused people to question his basic “fundamentals.” In a time when, even in Hollywood, anything that deviated from the accepted, supposedly normal, pattern was suspect.

Because of his walk, there were occasional questions about Jack’s virility.

The rumors about the possibility of Jack being gay–and they were just that, rumors–were initially prompted by his walk, and the rumors were spread widely by Jack himself, who always joked about his seemingly feminine gait.

There’s a story about Phil Harris, Benny’s band leader in radio, once saying “Put a dress on that guy and take him anywhere.”

There were many jokes done about Benny’s distinctive gait. It was a very simple bit and frequently done in many forms. One example was when Lucille Ball was supposed to show Jack something that was in another room. She was to start to exit and say, “Walk this way,” and as she walked away from him in a ladylike way, Jack was supposed to reply, “I always do.”

It wasn’t just the line that got a laugh. In fact, without Benny’s incredible timing the joke would not have worked nearly so well. A split second after she said her line the audience screamed and then went on screaming.

Jack waited, and waited, and waited. Finally he ad-libbed an apologetic shrug to the audience—as only he could do–and said, “I always do.” This resulted from an even bigger laugh from the audience.

Then, finally, he started to walk, perhaps “mincing” a bit more than usual. This final bit got the biggest laugh and a round of applause as he exited.

So what is “What’s My Line?” doing in the ranks of classic TV comedy, you may ask? Okay, it was a quiz show, but it certainly had many funny moments.

While panelists Arlene Francis, Dorothy Killgallen, and Bennett Cerf were not comedians, they were inadvertently responsible for many laughs coming out of the questioning of contestants. (I’ll give one example in a later article).

Thanks mostly to panelists such as Steve Allen, Fred Allen, Dick Cavett, Ernie Kovacs, and Victor Borge, though, there were many intentional funny moments. In fact that’s primarily why they were often brought back as guest panelists.

Consider some examples:

During the time on the show when the panelists were each allowed to take a wild guess about the occupation of a contestant when he was introduced.

Dorothy Killgallen said, “I think he raises goldfish.”

Steve Allen, whose turn came next, said, “I think he lowers goldfish.”

(Okay, maybe it’s not”classic”, but it is comedy, and the audience roared.)

Dick Cavett began appearing as a guest panelist when he was still relatively unknown as a performer. On an early appearance he remarked when it was his turn to question the mystery guest, “The mystery guest is probably sitting there wondering who I am.”

Victor Borge once put on a false beard when it was his turn to question the mystery guest, saying, “If I’m not going to know who he is, he’s not going to know who I am.”

Ernie Kovacs was questioning a mystery guest. Somehow, in earlier questioning it had been established that the guest’s last name was the same as a brand of automobile. The guest was Henry J. Kaiser (for those youngsters out there, Kaiser was once an automobile model).

Kovacs mentioned that fact again and said, “…now this is just a wild guess,but could you by any chance be Abraham Lincoln?”

The audience howled for thirty seconds or more and then, just as it is quiet, Kovacs pauses a beat and says, “I’m sorry, Sir, I didn’t hear your answer.” The laugh was even longer than before.

Comedy different than today. Not a series of gags but comedy of timing and opportunity.
Just one other thing I loved about “What’s My Line?” .