Jell-O's Dollface

Aside from Franklin Roosevelt--who is rated an amateur--smooth-tongued, silver-haired, 46-year-old Funnyman Jack Benny is the biggest voice in radio. With a Crossley (Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting) rating of 42.4, an estimated audience of 11,000,000 families, he is so important to General Foods, his sponsor, that the company devotes more than three-quarters of its advertising appropriation for Jell-O to his show. Just what it costs to ballyhoo Jell-O is something General Foods keeps under its hat. But no secret is the staggering gross that Benny will rake in this year for 35 half-hour appearances before an NBC mike. The take: $630,000, out of which Benny pays for an orchestra, announcer, gagmen and his cast, leaving a gratifying net before taxes of some $350,000.

Besides this radio salary, Benny this year will have a neat income from Paramount Pictures, which will pay him an estimated $200,000 for making a couple of cinemas. Last week, under Paramount auspices, Benny & Co. were shipped to Manhattan for the opening of Love Thy Neighbor, in which Benny and his fellow zany Fred Allen continue the weary mock feud that Allen cooked up four years ago.

As a moppet in Waukegan, Ill., where his father ran a haberdashery shop, Benny fiddled with juvenile orchestras, played for dances and firemen's balls. Proud hope of his family in those early years was that Benny would develop into a concert violinist. Instead he teamed at 17 with a vaudeville pianist named Cora Salisbury in an act called "From Grand Opera to Ragtime." As part of his business in this turn (for which he got $15 a week), Benny sawed away with the little finger of his bow hand elegantly extended, pretended to be mesmerized by its motion back & forth. On the vaudeville circuit around Waukegan this was uproarious, and Benny eventually became something of a local favorite, making $75 a week.

Not until after he joined the Navy in 1917 did Benny realize that his forte was ingratiating patter. Then, while appearing in a revue designed to step up recruiting and make money for the Navy, he cut loose with a couple of gags, got such a hand that he resolved to become a monologuist. During his hitch in the Navy, Benny went under his real name, Benjamin Kubelsky. After the war he changed to Ben K. Benny, adopted his present name when people began to confuse Ben K. Benny with a fiddler named Ben Bernie. During the '20s Benny went onward & upward without much fuss or muss. He drifted into radio in 1932.

The Jell-O script is turned out by a 33-year-old wag named Bill Morrow, whose salary is $1,500 a week, and his assistant, Eddie Beloin, who makes $560 less. Although the gags are theirs. Benny has a lot to do with shaping up the pro gram. Each Monday he gets together with his writers either in the bedroom of his 15-room French-Colonial mansion in Beverly Hills or in his Paramount dressing room to talk over his coming show. With Benny's secretary Harry Baldwin furiously taking notes, the show is roughed out on Monday, worked over for the next few days, put into rehearsal Friday night.

A highly vocal partner in Benny's shows is Mary Livingstone, his wife. A onetime stocking clerk in the May Co. in Los Angeles, Miss Livingstone, nee Sadie Marks, often depresses her fellow workers by the firmness she exhibits in advancing her convictions. So naturally, on the air, Benny plays a boastful but timorous character, who is a butt for everybody's gibes. He is badgered by Tenor Dennis Day, by Orchestra Leader Phil Harris, by Announcer Don Wilson, by Miss Livingstone--and by his valet Rochester. The Bennys have been married since 1927, have a six-year-old adopted daughter named Joan Naomi. Benny calls his wife "Doll"; she calls him "Dollface."

The bedroom where Benny works with his writers contains a four-poster bed, set in the midst of microphones, a recording machine, filing cabinets, a typewriter and a desk. Scattered about are innumerable pads and pencils. Like all the rooms in Benny's house, his bedroom is equipped with a radio and a public-address-system outlet.

Only fly in Benny's rich ointment last week was his difficulty in collaborating with Fred Allen in the radio promotion of Love Thy Neighbor. Allen is now a rival of Eddie Cantor, who is handled by the same agency that handles Benny. If Benny should team up with Allen on a show, it would obviously do Cantor no good. Consequently the agency would dearly love to squelch the feud it once promoted.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.