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Fred Allen

John Florence Sullivan (May 31, 1894 – March 17, 1956), known professionally as Fred Allen, was an American comedian. His absurdist, topically pointed radio program The Fred Allen Show (1932–1949) made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humorists in the Golden Age of American radio.

His best-remembered gag was his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but it was only part of his appeal; radio historian John Dunning (in On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio) wrote that Allen was perhaps radio's most admired comedian and most frequently censored. A master ad libber, Allen often tangled with his network's executives (and often barbed them on the air over the battles) while developing routines whose style and substance influenced fellow comic talents, including Groucho Marx, Stan Freberg, Henry Morgan, and Johnny Carson; his avowed fans also included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, humorist James Thurber, and novelists William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Herman Wouk (who began his career writing for Allen).

Allen was honored with stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for contributions to television and radio.

John Florence Sullivan was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Irish Catholic parents. Allen barely knew his mother, Cecilia Herlihy Sullivan, who died of pneumonia when he was not quite three years old. Along with his father, James Henry Sullivan, and his infant brother Robert, Allen was taken in by one of his mother's sisters, "my aunt Lizzie", around whom he focused the first chapter of his second memoir, Much Ado About Me. His father was so shattered by his mother's death that, according to Allen, he drank more heavily. His aunt suffered as well; her husband Michael was partially paralyzed by lead poisoning shortly after they married, leaving him mostly unable to work, something Allen remembered as causing contention among Lizzie's sisters. Eventually, Allen's father remarried and offered his sons the choice between coming with him and his new wife or staying with Aunt Lizzie. Allen's younger brother chose to go with their father, but Allen decided to stay with his aunt. "I never regretted it", he wrote.

Allen took piano lessons as a boy, his father having brought an Emerson upright along when they moved in with his aunt. He learned exactly two songs – "Hiawatha" and "Pitter, Patter, Little Raindrops" – and would be asked to play "half or all my repertoire" when visitors came to the house. He also worked at the Boston Public Library, where he discovered a book about the origin and development of comedy. Enduring various upheavals at home (other aunts came and went, prompting several moves), Allen also took up juggling while learning as much as possible about comedy.

Some library co-workers planned to put on a show and asked him to do a bit of juggling and some of his comedy. When a girl in the crowd told him, "You're crazy to keep working here at the library; you ought to go on stage," Allen decided his career path was set.

In 1914, at the age of 20, Allen took a job with a local piano company, in addition to his library work. He appeared at a number of amateur night competitions, soon taking the stage name Fred St. James, and booking with the local vaudeville circuit at $30 a week, enough at that time to allow him to quit his jobs with the library and the piano company. Eventually he became "Freddy James," often billing himself as the world's worst juggler. Allen refined the mix of his deliberately clumsy juggling and the standard jokes and one-liners, directing much of the humor at his own poor juggling abilities. During his time in vaudeville, his act evolved more toward monologic comedy and less juggling. In 1917, returning to the New York circuit, his stage name was changed to Fred Allen so that he would not be offered the same low salary that theater owners had been accustomed to paying him in his early career. His new surname came from Edgar Allen, a booker for the Fox theaters.

In 1922, Allen commissioned comic-strip artist Martin Branner to cover a theater curtain with an elaborate mural painting depicting a cemetery with a punchline on each gravestone. This was the "Old Joke Cemetery," where overworked gags go to die. In Allen's act, the audiences would see the curtain (and have several minutes to read its 46 punchlines) before Allen made his entrance. Audiences typically would be laughing at the curtain before Allen even appeared. Robert Taylor's biography of Allen includes an impressive full-length photo of Branner's curtain painting, and many of the punchlines are clearly legible in the photo.

Allen used a variety of gimmicks in his changing act, from a ventriloquist dummy to juggling to singing, but the focus was always on his comedy, which was heavy on wordplay. One recurring bit was to read a purported "letter from home" with material such as the following:

"The man next door has bought pigs; we got wind of it this morning. Your father had a terrible fight with him about it, and the man hit your father with a rock in the left ear. It didn't bother your father; he is stone deaf in that ear. The policeman who took him away said that he would get his hearing in the morning. The other man, the one who owns the pigs, was arrested for fragrancy... There is no other news except that our oil stove exploded yesterday and blew your father and me out into the backyard. It is the first time we have been out together for twenty years.

Allen's wit was at times not intended for the vaudeville audience but rather for other professionals in show business. After one of his appearances failed one day, Allen made the best of it by circulating an obituary of his act on black-bordered funeral stationery. He also mailed vials of his supposed "flop sweat" to newspapers as part of his comic self-promotion.

In 1921 Fred Allen and Nora Bayes toured with the company of Lew Fields. Their musical director was a nineteen-year-old Richard Rodgers. Many years later, when he and Oscar Hammerstein II appeared as mystery guests on What's My Line?, Rodgers recalled Allen's act, sitting on the edge of the stage, his legs dangling down, playing a banjo while telling jokes.

Taking one of his regular late night strolls up New York's West 57th Street on Saturday night, March 17, 1956, Allen suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 61.A popular myth repeated for many years, first published in The New York Times story appearing the day after Allen's death, was that he had died while walking his dog. However, biographer Robert Taylor later revealed that Allen had never owned a dog. Allen died before he could complete the final chapter of his memoirs, and as a result the book was published as he had left it. He was a tireless letter writer, and his letters were edited by his wife into the publication of Fred Allen's Letters in 1965.

During the following night's regular Sunday broadcast of What's My Line? at 10:30 p.m., barely 24 hours following Allen's death, host John Daly preceded the program with a special message to the viewing audience. He stated that earlier in the day the producers had considered replacing the regular game play with a special memorial episode, but Allen's wife Portland Hoffa stated that she preferred the show be conducted as it always had been, indicating that this is what Allen would have wanted. The program then proceeded as normal, but with a noticeably subdued tone. Steve Allen (no relation) took Fred's chair on the panel. During the final ninety seconds of the program Steve Allen, Arlene Francis and Bennett Cerf (whose eyes began to tear) gave brief but heartfelt tributes to Fred.[24] A somber Dorothy Kilgallen thanked Steve Allen for stepping in and helping them to carry on at a difficult moment; a similar on-air farewell would air after Kilgallen herself died unexpectedly in 1965.

Allen has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: a radio star at 6713 Hollywood Boulevard and a TV star at 7001 Hollywood Boulevard.[4] Allen was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1988. A pedestrian passageway in the Boston Theater District, designated "Allen's Alley", also honors his memory.

Allen's widow, Portland Hoffa, married bandleader Joe Rines in 1959 and celebrated a second silver wedding anniversary well before her own death of natural causes in Los Angeles on Christmas Day, 1990. Allen and Hoffa are buried alongside each other in section 47 at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York. Both Allen's real and stage names are engraved on the headstone.

Courtesy--wikipedia
- Fred Allen

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