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has to get away from it ail, he merely piles into his car and takes off. When he works, he is a perfec¬ tionist. He spends as much time on his radio show today as he did ten years ago when radio was king and he was its crown prince. And he gets as much fun out of it. Oddly enough, Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone, suffers miserably through the whole business of a Jack Benny show. A mainstay on the radio show almost since its inception, she has no conception of herself as a star, dis¬ likes publicity and would give her left arm to get out of it. She loves show business for Jack, hates it for herself. “This,” she says defiantly, “is absolutely my last season.” May Abandon Radio Jack himself is reluctant about re¬ turning to radio next year. “If the sponsor wants me to do TV every other week, that will be the end of the radio show.” Benny thus far hasn’t found it at all difficult to come up with a TV show once every three weeks and feels at the moment that every other week won’t be any harder. “The ideas just seem to come,” he says. “We never point deliberately for a ‘great’ show. And if one does happen to come off better than most, we don’t knock ourselves out trying to top it. We just do ’em as they come along.” Papa Won’t Push If Benny has a major interest aside from show business, it is his adopted daughter, Joan, now 19 and a junior at Stanford. He and Mary have made it a policy from the beginning to keep her in the background and to let her grow up in as normal surroundings as possible. She has appeared on two or three of Jack’s radio shows and on one TV show, but the decision has al¬ ways been hers. Benny is proud of his daughter and sure she can make her own way without undue help from him. Perhaps the master of comedy tim¬ ing onstage, Benny offstage can bum¬ ble along with the best of them. He frequently forgets names and is hon¬ est enough to become covered with confusion instead of trying to ad lib his way out with a funny line. The funny line, in fact, has never been Benny’s forte. He is more the intro¬ vert, a quiet man content to let things ride and preferring to have his audi¬ No limelight: Jack with daughter, Joan. ences seated out front rather than gathered around him at a bar. Unlike most comedians, he invariably thinks the other fellow a very funny man and is known among his cohorts as “the best audience in the business.” With Benny in the front row, a come¬ dian is guaranteed a belly laugh on even his worst jokes.