65 Facts About Fred Allen

John Florence Sullivan, known professionally as Fred Allen, was an American comedian.

Fred Allen's best-remembered gag was his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but that was only part of his appeal.

Radio historian John Dunning wrote that Allen was perhaps radio's most admired comedian and most frequently censored.

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

Fred Allen barely knew his mother, Cecilia Sullivan, who died of pneumonia when he was not quite three years old.

Fred Allen's father was so shattered by his mother's death that according to Allen, he drank more heavily.

Fred Allen's aunt suffered as well; her husband, Michael, was partially paralyzed by lead poisoning shortly after they married, which left him mostly unable to work; Allen remembered that as causing contention among Lizzie's sisters.

Fred Allen was a Catholic and regularly attended Mass at St Malachy's Church in Manhattan.

Fred Allen took piano lessons as a boy, his father having brought an Emerson upright along when they moved in with his aunt.

Fred Allen worked at the Boston Public Library, where he discovered a book about the origin and the development of comedy.

In 1914, at the age of 20, Fred Allen took a job with a local piano company, in addition to his library work.

Fred Allen appeared at a number of amateur night competitions, soon took the stage name Fred St James, and booked with the local vaudeville circuit at $30 a week, enough at the time to allow him to quit his jobs with the library and the piano company.

Fred Allen refined the mix of his deliberately-clumsy juggling and the standard jokes and one-liners.

Fred Allen directed much of the humor at his own poor juggling abilities.

In 1922, Fred 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.

In Fred Allen's act, the audiences would see the curtain before Fred Allen made his entrance.

Robert Taylor's biography of Fred Allen includes an impressive full-length photo of Branner's curtain painting, and many of the punchlines are clearly legible in the photo.

Fred 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.

Fred Allen's wit was at times intended not for the vaudeville audience but rather for other professionals in show business.

Fred Allen mailed vials of his supposed "flop sweat" to newspapers as part of his comic self-promotion.

Fred Allen temporarily left vaudeville, moving to work in such Shubert Brothers stage productions as The Passing Show in 1922.

Fred Allen received good notices for his comic work in several of the productions, particularly Vogues and Greenwich Village Follies, and continued to develop his comic writing.

Fred Allen spent his summer in Boston, honed his comic and writing skills even further, worked in a "respectfully" received duo that billed themselves as Fink and Smith, and played a few of the dying vaudeville houses.

Fred Allen returned to New York to the pleasant surprise that Portland Hoffa was taking instruction to convert to Roman Catholicism.

Also in that cast was a young Englishman named Archie Leach, who received as many good notices for his romantic appeal as Fred Allen got for his comic work.

Polly never succeeded in spite of several retoolings, but Fred Allen went on to successful shows like The Little Show and Three's a Crowd, which eventually led to his full-time entry to radio in 1932.

Fred Allen first hosted The Linit Bath Club Revue on CBS and moved the show to NBC to become The Salad Bowl Revue later in the year.

Fred Allen's perfectionism caused him to leap from sponsor to sponsor until Town Hall Tonight allowed him to set his chosen small-town milieu and establish himself as a bona fide radio star.

Fred Allen did semi-satirical interpretations of well-known lives, including his own.

In 1940, Fred Allen moved back to CBS Radio with a new sponsor and show name, Texaco Star Theater, airing every Wednesday at 9:00 pm ET on CBS, then Sundays at 9:00 pm in the fall of 1941.

Fred Allen chafed under being forced to give up a Town Hall Tonight signature of using barely-known and amateur guests effectively in favor of booking more recognizable guests although he liked many of them.

Fred Allen held himself personally responsible for the show's success and devoted much of his time to writing and rewriting routines and scripts.

Fred Allen's condition was diagnosed as hypertension, and he was forced to take more than a year off.

Concurrent with his radio duties, Fred Allen made occasional motion pictures by appearing in seven full-length features and three shorts between 1929 and 1952.

Fred Allen followed it with two shorts for Vitaphone, filmed in New York.

Fred Allen again made a few changes, including the singing DeMarco Sisters to whom he had been tipped by arranger-composer Gordon Jenkins.

The inspiration for the mythical Main Street of "Fred Allen's Alley" came from the small-town heartland folks who were often profiled in the newspaper columns written by O O McIntyre, one of the most popular columnists of the 1930s, with some seven million readers.

Fred Allen employed a writing staff, but it served as his sounding boards and early draft consultants as much as actual writers.

Fred Allen's ad-libbing ability caused many a show to fade away behind the ending network identification because Allen often ate up air time.

Fred Allen kept track of how much time he was losing to Allen over a period of a few months, and when the total reached 15 minutes, Baker barged into the studio 15 minutes earlier than schedule, while Allen was on the air, and took over the show by welcoming the audience to Take It or Leave It.

Fred Allen "died" more eloquently than other radio comics, particularly in the later years.

Fred Allen was able to negotiate a lucrative new contract as a result not only of the show's success but in large measure to NBC's anxiety to keep more of its stars from joining Jack Benny in a wholesale defection to CBS as well as to retain its services for its rapidly-expanding television programming.

However, a year later, Fred Allen was knocked off his perch not by a talent raid but by a show on a third rival network, ABC.

Fred Allen never had to pay up, and he was not shy about lampooning the game-show phenomenon.

Unfortunately, Fred Allen fell to number 38 in the radio ratings, which was compounded by the rise of television in many major cities.

Fred Allen stepped down from radio again in 1949, at the end of his show's regular season, as much under his doctor's orders as because of his slipping ratings.

Fred Allen decided to take a year off, but it did more for his health than his career.

Fred Allen often mentioned his show-business friends on the air, and on the Canin broadcast Fred Allen knew Benny would be listening.

Fred Allen starred with Oscar Levant in 20th Century-Fox's anthology film O Henry's Full House, in The Ransom of Red Chief.

Benny even used the feud on his TV show, when Fred Allen appeared as a special guest in 1953.

Fred Allen got the line cleared only after pointing out that cemeteries have been topics for comedy since the time of Aristophanes.

Fred Allen appeared on 24 of the show's 57 installments, including the landmark premiere, and showed he had not lost his trademark ad-lib skill or his rapier wit.

In some ways, The Big Show was an offspring of the old Fred Allen show; his one-time Texaco Star Theater announcer, Jimmy Wallington, was one of The Big Show's announcers, and Portland Hoffa made several appearances with him as well.

NBC insisted on Fred Allen trying to adapt his radio show for television.

Fred Allen proposed bringing "Allen's Alley" to television in a visual setting similar to Our Town.

Fred Allen was one of the original hosts and appeared five times before he dropped out in April 1951.

The revised premise had Fred Allen interviewing three panelists, who would listen to three new popular songs and vote for the one that they thought had the most potential.

Fred Allen credited Goodson and Todman for "keeping me alive" in show business.

Fred Allen wrote Treadmill to Oblivion and Much Ado About Me ; the former, which included many of his vintage radio scripts, was the best-selling book on radio's classic period for many years.

However, biographer Robert Taylor later revealed that Fred Allen had never owned a dog.

Fred 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.

Fred Allen was a tireless letter writer, and his letters were edited by his wife into the publication of Fred Allen's Letters in 1965.

Fred Allen 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.

Fred 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.

Fred Allen was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1988.