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Not a Day Over 39

Jack Benny will be honored this weekend at a convention, \"39 Forever,\" sponsored by the International Jack Benny Fan Club and the National Comedy Hall of Fame.
[additional-authors]
February 13, 2003

In one of his most famous bits, comic Jack Benny was held upby a thug who demanded, “Your money or your life.” His response was silence.And more silence. Then, desperately, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!”

The fiddle-playing Jewish comedian (1894-1974) dominatedradio and TV for decades with his persona of a put-upon, miserly fellow whoinsisted he was 39. He’ll be honored this weekend at a convention, “39Forever,” sponsored by the International Jack Benny Fan Club and the NationalComedy Hall of Fame. Events will include Museum of TV and Radio screenings,trivia games, a Friars Club banquet and panel discussions with experts such asBenny’s daughter, Joan; his manager, Irving Fein; satirist Harry Shearer; andEddie Carroll of the Benny tribute “Laughter in Bloom.”

If the comic was America’s best-known cheapskate, he avoidedthe anti-Semitic stereotype.

“Benny secularized cheapness,” cultural historian NealGabler told The Forward in 1999. “People didn’t go around saying, ‘Boy, thatcheap Jew, Benny.'”

Despite his riffs on stinginess, most listeners never knewthe Midwesterner (ne Benjamin Kubelsky) was Jewish. Unlike comics such as EddieCantor and George Jessel, he sounded less “like a Catskill refugee” than a”middle American, middle-class everyman,” Gerald Nachman wrote in his book,”Raised on Radio” (Pantheon, 1998).

Yet by creating his lovable cheapskate character during theDepression, this son of a Russian immigrant drew “on the Eastern EuropeanJewish condition and [applied] it to his American audiences,” Lawrence Epsteinwrote in “The Haunted Smile” (PublicAffairs, 2002), his book on Jews andcomedy.

In Benny’s private life, the tightwad image came with aprice.

 “He’d always tip extra, just to prove he wasn’t cheap,”Fein told The Journal.

At her Beverly Hills home on a recent Friday afternoon, JoanBenny, who is in her 60s, sat in a book-lined living room decorated with herfather’s memorabilia and described how dad grew up in an Orthodox home inWaukegan, Ill., the son of a haberdasher. When he was 8, his father gave him a$100 violin; his parents were appalled when he asked to take his fiddle on thevaudeville circuit a decade later. Permission came only when his pianistpromised to shield him from treif and loose women.

According to Benny’s unpublished autobiography, he met hisfuture wife, Sadie Marks, when fellow vaudevillian Zeppo Marx took him to adistant relative’s Passover seder around 1921. After Benny broke into radio 11years later, Marks eventually joined the cast as his on-again, off-againgirlfriend, Mary Livingstone (thereafter, Marks used that name in her privatelife).

By the time the Bennys segued into television in 1950, theyhad adopted Joan from a Jewish agency and moved into a Beverly Hills two-storywhite brick Georgian next door to Lucy and Desi. Their lavish Hollywood partiesincluded guests such as Frank Sinatra and Barbara Stanwyck, Joan said.

She described her father as an irreligious man who attendedHillcrest country club and had a Canter’s sandwich named for him, but rarelyset foot in synagogue. Each December, a 10-foot-tall Christmas tree graced thebay window in their first-floor library, where dad presided over scriptwritingsessions in his Queen Anne winged leather chair. On Friday nights, the familyate gribenes and other Jewish delicacies at the grandparents’ duplex on ThirdStreet near Fairfax Avenue, “which was about as religious as we got,” she said.

She felt the butler needed roller skates when the familydined at the home of dad’s best friend, Jewish comic George Burns.

“The two of them ate so fast, I think, because of theiryears in vaudeville trying to wolf down meals in between eight shows a day,”she said.

Her father’s relationship with Burns revealed much aboutBenny’s on-air persona. “Minus the stinginess, he was exactly like hischaracter,” she said. “He played a kind of mild-mannered patsy, the butt of thejoke, and he was like that with George and in real life. For example, my fathercould never make George laugh, but all George had to do was lift a finger andmy father would fall down on the floor.”

Joan recalled her dad wearing crazy outfits when greetingthe cigar-puffing Burns (Burns didn’t crack a smile) and his mock exasperationwhen his pal hung up on him in the middle of a telephone conversation.

“At dinner with the two of them, you were just waiting forsomething to happen,” she said.

The American public did the same throughout Benny’s weeklyradio and TV shows.

Fan club President Laura Leff, 33, hopes the convention willintroduce a whole new generation to his work. Leff, who founded the club at age10 after viewing Benny reruns, isn’t alone.

“It’s meaningful to me that younger people will discoverJack,” Fein said.

For information about the convention, which runs fromFeb. 14-16,  visit www.jackbenny.org.

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