Radio and television mirror (Jan-June 1950)

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My Boss, Walter O'Keefe (Continued from page 45) Walter O'Keefe gets more good spontaneous laughter out of his contestants than any other quizmaster in radio. "When the contestants are getting the laughs, the show is clicking," O'Keefe declares — and means it. That this happens so frequently on Double or Nothing is, for me, simply explained. O'Keefe inspires people to rise above themselves. The first job I ever did for him is a perfect example of that. Walt came along at a crucial time of my life — summer, 1940. After considerable early success in the musical side of radio, I'd suffered a serious illness, which, coupled with a long convalescence, had completely severed my connections so that I'd been reduced to playing the piano in a Connecticut summer resort inn. With a wife and three sons to support, and nothing in sight after the summer season was over the outlook for me was a bit grim. It brightened more than a little when I first met Walt through doing some vocal arrangements for his wife, Roberta, at that time a featured singer in Broadway stage shows. Before long, Walt and I had begun a song-writing collaboration that continues to this day. He's words, and I'm music. One night, after I'd known him only about three weeks, I got a telephone call from O'Keefe at the place where I was working. "How'd you like to conduct the orchestra in a musical air show I'm auditioning?" he asked me. I said I would, and I did. However the show failed to connect with a sponsor; deprived of this vital connection it perished, taking with it a bale of O'Keefe's cash. Walt went back to vaudeville and the night clubs to re-establish his preeminence in the field from which he'd first bounded up to radio's dizziest heights. I went with him as his accompanist. I had a barrel of fun and I learned more about the fundamentals of show business in those years on the road with Walt than I could have learned in a life time of studio work. To hit just a few of the spots of the O'Keefe career, we'll have to go back to Hartford, Connecticut, where Walt was born in the year 1900. Walt began his travels by voyaging to London, England, at the age of twelve, to live with his mother's brother, a Catholic priest. Four years of the devout presbytery atmosphere gave young Walter the idea he wanted to be a priest like his uncle, whom he greatly loved and admired. One year in a junior seminary back in Hartford convinced him he'd mistaken his vocation. His puckish eagerness to make people laugh, and his delight at finding this not too difficult, deflected his aim from the pulpit to the stage. Next stop for O'Keefe was South Bend, Indiana, where he enrolled at Notre Dame, and, not liking the university's freshman accommodations, wangled a room in Knute Rockne's home. "Rock got me my first bookings as an entertainer," Walt will tell you with obvious satisfaction. "As the outstanding football coach of his time, he was in great demand as an after-dinner speaker at civic gatherings around the state. He used to take me along as his introductory speaker, to tell a few jokes and put people in a good humor." Between his freshman and sophomore years at Notre Dame, Walt spent a year in the U.S. Marine Corps, in 1917-18. Various illnesses culminated in severe influenza frustrated his hope of getting overseas; he celebrated Armistice in sick bay. After returning to Notre Dame and being graduated with a B.A. degree, he went into newspaper and advertising work until the big Florida boom of the mid-twenties sirened him southward. In Florida he teamed up with Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur and J. P. McEvoy to promote Key Largo. Then the boom busted. Sad to say, Hecht, MacArthur, O'Keefe, and McEvoy had believed in their own publicity and invested heavily. About this time Walt decided to give his old yen for show business something to feed on and headed for New York where, after a brief interlude of selling real estate, he worked into small time vaudeville as a solo song and act, complete with straw hat and ukelele. He saved paying royalties on his songs by writing them himself. From vaudeville O'Keefe worked into the nightclubs, emceeing and singing in floor shows, first for Texas Guinan, later for Barney Gallant. His nightclub career reached an early climax when he opened a new super-flossy mid-Manhattan night spot as the featured star with his name up in lights and a salary of $780 a week. For his first night Walt wrote a new song, a typically witty number kidding Tammany's candidate in the mayoralty race which was in full heat at the time. His song brought down the house, but it also brought down on Walt the wrath of the nightclub owner who, unbeknownst to O'Keefe, was a Tammany man. His second night he was looking for another job. It was about this time that Walt met and fell in love with the lovely blonde ingenue of "Bandwagon," the show which some competent critics have called the best musical ever staged on Broadway. The ingenue's name was Roberta Robinson. Not long after meeting Walter, she changed it to Roberta O'Keefe. That was in June, 1932. In their more than seventeen years together, Walt and Roberta have produced two sons and a solid, hapny marriage. I spend a lot of my offstudio time at their house, and I know. After his marriage, Walt w€>nt back into radio and for the next several years was never far from radio's top, both in prestige and in earnings. Then came his big gamble on the expensive musical air show, in which I conducted the orchestra — and it flopped, just about cleaning out the O'Keefe bankroll. So that, at the age of forty Walt had to rebuild his career, if not from the basement up, at least from the first floor. He's come back to the top in radio through seeing and seizing an opening that a lot of other stars had overlooked. Early in 1947, he spent a few weeks filling in for Don McNeill on the Breakfast Club while Don was ill. That experience opened his eyes to t'ie importance, as well as the enjoyableness of daytime radio. "This daytime stuff is for me, from now on," Walt told me one day, while he was still on Breakfast Out . "The whole atmosphere is different f i om that ulcer-breeding tension you get on the nighttime shows. This is so much more relaxed, informal, that it's fun. And