Bob and Ray: Keener Than Most Persons by David Pollock

Author:David Pollock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: biography, comedy
Publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books
Published: 2014-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

By the autumn of 1955, NBC Television’s five-year Sunday-night franchise, The Colgate Comedy Hour, was in a downward spiral. A name change to The Colgate Variety Hour apparently was not the answer, and with the company’s decision to stop throwing its money against their competition on CBS, The Ed Sullivan Show, the program vanished after the last Sunday of the year. Its doddering stars—Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, and Abbott & Costello—had already moved on, happily under their own power. Viewers of that final broadcast had to count on host Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians for the laughs.

Its hastily assembled successor was the brand-new NBC Comedy Hour, inaugurated, the network explained, with the intent of discovering new, fresh, young talent. Why the indomitable baseball icon Leo Durocher and sixty-three-year-old William Frawley were selected to headline the first program was left unexplained. On January 8, 1956, Bob and Ray joined series regular Jonathan Winters in Hollywood as guests on the premiere. Like Liz Goulding, Winters grew up in Springfield, Ohio. The two had met through Liz’s older sister, Barbara, a close friend of Jonathan’s mother, Alice, who hosted a radio show in Dayton.

During a rehearsal break at NBC’s El Capitan Theatre on Vine Street, Bob and Ray and their wives found themselves—along with two of the week’s other “new talent” discoveries, Henny Youngman and female bandleader and songstress Ina Ray Hutton—comprising an impromptu audience for Jonathan Winters. “He was entertaining everybody,” Bob said.

For Liz and Jonathan, flashbacks to their Springfield days were inevitable. Back then, she recalled, unable to suppress a laugh, “Johnny was a pain in the neck because he was always ‘on.’ But we were friends and acquaintances.” On an earlier visit home, she said, Ray had even been a guest on Jonathan’s mother’s program.

The Elliotts and the Gouldings turned the boys’ first major prime-time guest-shot into a fun week in Hollywood. “We shared dinners and went out together,” Liz said. But, she added, she and Ray were not with Bob and Lee as constantly as they might have been as “they were kind of newlyweds, so to speak.”

Also stepping off a New York flight was a short, reed-thin twenty-year-old prodigy, a recent graduate of the NBC Writers Development Program named Woody Allen. At the time, he had just been added to the staff (on trial) and was pulling down $169 a week. Another Comedy Hour writer, Danny Simon, older brother and former collaborator of playwright Neil Simon, had been so impressed with Woody’s writing samples submitted by one of the Development Program’s honchos, ex-agent Les Colodny, that he responded, “Les, I think the kid is my next brother.”

Woody Allen first discovered Bob and Ray during his teenage years, which had only ended a month earlier, on his last birthday. He was “an enormous fan and listened to them or watched them on television at every opportunity,” Woody stated in 2012, “and of course saw them when they appeared on Broadway. . . . They were clearly brilliantly funny—always hilarious, two original and authentically funny men.

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