We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
tions. She has long since learned they are wholly meaningless. While he has a small army of friends, those closest to him are his longtime partner, Eddie Jackson; his accompanist, Julie Buffano, and a writer, Jackie Barnett. His wife, the former Jeanne Olsen, died in 1943. They had been married 27 years and her death was a blow from which Jimmy has never fully recovered. Paradoxically, it was Jeanne’s death which was partially responsible for the boom in his career over the past 10 years. An M-G-M stand-by, he had been slowly fading in popularity to the point where a younger genera¬ tion had hardly heard of him. Des¬ pondent in Hollywood when Jeanne died, he headed for New York and halfheartedly accepted an offer from the Copacabana. The results were quite hectic. Durante was discovered all over again, the New York critics and columnists welcomed him back to the fold with much loud braying. The boom hit its peak in 1950 when Durante did his first TV show for NBC. Suddenly confident that he had found what he had been looking for, Durante got together with Eddie Can¬ tor and laid down a few new rules of the game. “We’re a couple of old guys,” they told the network, “and we’d like to do things the easy way for a change. We want to do our shows from California. And we don’t want to do any more than one a month.” Thus was born the rotating comic principle, now the backbone of the Colgate Comedy Hour. With the exception of young Donald O’Connor, Durante is the easiest hunk of talent to get along with the net¬ work has yet found. And O’Connor’s edge lies only in his facility for learn¬ ing his lines quickly. No longer a young man, Durante finds it tough to keep an entire show in his head and makes frequent use of a series of off- camera cards on which his fines are printed in large block letters. The problem is further complicated by the fact that Jimmy’s eyes aren’t what they used to be, and that won¬ derfully quizzical expression on-cam¬ era is more often than not a case of Durante trying to figure out what has been written on the cards. Santa’s Busy Helper Temperament is a word Durante doesn’t understand and can’t pro¬ nounce anyway. It simply is not in his make-up. He works earnestly at his trade, his slight build, wispy hair and furrowed brows giving the im¬ pression of one of Santa Claus’ help¬ ers banging away at the toys in an effort to beat the Christmas deadline. More often than not, Jimmy has something on his mind when he’s working, something that worries him out of all proportion to its worth. On his last show of the 1952-53 season, he was washing up in his dressing room when three NBC executives came in to see him. They talked at length about their plans for Durante for the next year, but Jimmy seemed to be off in another world somewhere. Finally he strode to the door and hollered for Jackie Barnett. “Jackie!” he commanded, his graveled voice edged with concern. “Them two old guys out on the street. Did ya get the tickets for ’em? Are they gonna get to see the show?” He had and they would, and another weighty United Nations problem, Du¬ rante version, had been settled. Wholesome taste; he only pretends sur¬ prise when seen reaching for the milk. 17