37 Facts About Jackie Gleason

Jackie Gleason enjoyed a prominent secondary music career during the 1950s and 1960s, producing a series of best-selling "mood music" albums.

Jackie Gleason'sparents were Herbert Walton "Herb" Gleason, born in New York City, and Mae Agnes "Maisie" .

The family of his first girlfriend, Julie Dennehy, offered to take him in; Jackie Gleason was headstrong and insisted that he was going into the heart of the city.

Jackie Gleason worked his way up to a job at New York's Club 18, where insulting its patrons was the order of the day.

When Jackie Gleason reported to his induction, doctors discovered that his broken left arm had healed crooked, that a pilonidal cyst existed at the end of his coccyx, and that he was 100 pounds overweight.

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Jackie Gleason was therefore classified 4-F and rejected for military service.

Jackie Gleason did not make a strong impression on Hollywood at first; at the time, he developed a nightclub act that included comedy and music.

When Jackie Gleason moved to CBS, Kelton was left behind; her name had been published in Red Channels, a book that listed and described reputed communists in television and radio, and the network did not want to hire her.

Jackie Gleason reluctantly let her leave the cast, with a cover story for the media that she had "heart trouble".

In 1959, Jackie Gleason discussed the possibility of bringing back The Honeymooners in new episodes.

Jackie Gleason'sdream was partially realized with a Kramden-Norton sketch on a CBS variety show in late 1960 and two more sketches on his new hour-long CBS show The American Scene Magazine in 1962.

Jackie Gleason believed there was a ready market for romantic instrumentals.

Jackie Gleason'sgoal was to make "musical wallpaper that should never be intrusive, but conducive".

At one point, Jackie Gleason held the record for charting the most number-one albums on the Billboard 200 without charting any hits on the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

Jackie Gleason knows a lot more about music than people give him credit for.

In 1956 Jackie Gleason revived his original variety hour, winning a Peabody Award.

In 1962, Jackie Gleason resurrected his variety show with more splashiness and a new hook: a fictitious general-interest magazine called The American Scene Magazine, through which Jackie Gleason trotted out his old characters in new scenarios, including two new Honeymooners sketches.

Each show began with Jackie Gleason delivering a monologue and commenting on the attention-getting outfits of band leader Sammy Spear.

Jackie Gleason revived The Honeymooners—first with Sue Ane Langdon as Alice and Patricia Wilson as Trixie for two episodes of The American Scene Magazine, then with Sheila MacRae as Alice and Jane Kean as Trixie for the 1966 series.

Occasionally Jackie Gleason would devote the show to musicals with a single theme, such as college comedy or political satire, with the stars abandoning their Honeymooners roles for different character roles.

Jackie Gleason wanted The Honeymooners to be just a portion of his format, but CBS wanted another season of only The Honeymooners.

Jackie Gleason simply stopped doing the show in 1970 and left CBS when his contract expired.

Gleason did two Jackie Gleason Show specials for CBS after giving up his regular show in the 1970s, including Honeymooners segments and a Reginald Van Gleason III sketch in which the gregarious millionaire was portrayed as a comic drunk.

In 1985, three decades after the "Classic 39" began filming, Jackie Gleason revealed he had carefully preserved kinescopes of his live 1950s programs in a vault for future use .

Jackie Gleason played a world-weary army sergeant in Soldier in the Rain, in which he received top billing over Steve McQueen.

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Jackie Gleason wrote, produced and starred in Gigot, in which he played a poor, mute janitor who befriended and rescued a prostitute and her small daughter.

Jackie Gleason played the lead in the Otto Preminger-directed Skidoo, considered an all-star failure.

Reynolds said that director Hal Needham gave Jackie Gleason free rein to ad-lib a great deal of his dialog and make suggestions for the film; the scene at the "Choke and Puke" was Jackie Gleason's idea.

Jackie Gleason would fly back and forth to Los Angeles for relatively minor movie work.

Jackie Gleason proposed to buy two tickets to the movie and take the store owner; he would be able to see the actor in action.

Jackie Gleason was greatly interested in the paranormal, reading many books on the topic, as well as books on parapsychology and UFOs.

Jackie Gleason met dancer Genevieve Halford when they were working in vaudeville, and they started to date.

One evening when Jackie Gleason went onstage at the Club Miami in Newark, New Jersey, he saw Halford in the front row with a date.

In early 1954, Jackie Gleason suffered a broken leg and ankle on-air during his television show.

Jackie Gleason met his second wife, Beverly McKittrick, at a country club in 1968, where she worked as a secretary.

Jackie Gleason delivered a critically acclaimed performance as an infirm, acerbic, and somewhat Archie Bunker-like character in the Tom Hanks comedy-drama Nothing in Common .

Jackie Gleason kept his medical problems private, although there were rumors that he was seriously ill.