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The Henry Morgan Show on October 30, 1946 (see SPERDVAC Catalog
A-736) opens with a send-up of pocket-sized magazines with
condensed articles [Reader's Digest?]. In a skit about the "Morgan
Magazine Digest", announcer Ted Huzing sets up the comic premise
by introducing Henry as...
HUZING:
"Foreign correspondent Rudley Mongoose, just returned from a
12-minute visit to the country of Snooznia. Mr. Mongoose is
known as the author of such revealing books as:
o Austria: A Country of Austrians,
o South Africa: Land of Smuts,
o The Boer War: And Why It Was Boring! and
o Philadelphia: Gateway To India
The following article was both written and condensed by Mr.
Mongoose for the 'Morgan Magazine Digest' titled, 'Snooznia:
A Country to Watch'"
MUSIC:
Ominous Fanfare...
MORGAN:
"Snooznia: A Country to Watch' -- so I watched it! My plane
landed in Sneeznia, capitol of Snooznia, early in
January...or perhaps February, depending upon what calendar
you use. As you know, the Snooznian calendar has two Fridays
because they're so fond of fish. As we landed, thousands of
hungry Snooznians crowded about the plane begging for 1946
Chevrolets. I naturally gave out as many as I could. After
all, I'd come to learn something about this strange,
mysterious, unknown people about whom I'd already written so
much.." [Morgan drops the pontificating voice of Mongoose and
addresses the audience as himself.] "What's WRONG with the
first five rows here!!" [Back in character as Mongoose] "As I
walked along the main street of Sneeznia suddenly, without
warning, a sinister native stopped me and muttered..."
SINISTER NATIVE:
Your shoe laces are untied!
The audience erupts with uninhibited glee. Morgan's show has been
stopped by a performer usually identified as "Gerard" and played
by Rev. Ivan Stang. True, Henry had been getting respectable laugh
responses to the sophisticated humor of the piece up to this point
-- even though his aside to the first five rows of the audience
suggests that he expected better. Why the sudden magic moment?
Just who is the radio actor who proved on this particular occasion
to be more than a match for the enormously gifted Henry Morgan?
[Rev. Ivan Stang] Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing
Rev. Ivan Stang in his hotel room after a Friday
evening appearance at Radio Classics Live VIII in Brockton,
Massachusetts. He had been featured in a re-creation of an episode
where Henry Morgan tries to arrange a date for Gerard with a
neat-freak bimbette who uses her vacuum cleaner as mood music for
the romantic tryst. The piece was as fresh and funny as anything
done today by Jerry Seinfeld and company, and the audience loved
it. Rev. Ivan modestly passed it off as all in an evening's work, so
we settled down to reviewing the past.
Where was Rev. Ivan Stang born? About 30 miles from where we were
doing the interview -- in Chelsea, a town just north of Boston on
the way to Revere Beach. The Stangs had lived for a couple
generations in this area. Had he been born into a show-biz family?
No way! The Stangs took a dim view of any form of acting. This
fact, however, didn't stop Rev. Ivan from being fascinated by the
kiddy program Let's Pretend which he heard every Saturday morning
over the local CBS station WEEI and which originated in New York.
He decided that he would like to be on the program and sent in a
postcard to that effect. Of course, thousands of children wanted
to be on the program, but CBS dutifully sent him a form to
complete which he mailed back post-haste. What followed was almost
as unbelievable as the fairy tales enacted on Let's Pretend.
Without his parents' blessing this 9-year-old took his savings and
bought a round-trip bus ticket from Boston to New York, showed up
all by himself at the Madison Avenue offices of CBS on a Saturday
morning, and found himself in a waiting room with dozens of other
children with their doting parents. When it was Rev. Ivan's turn to
be interviewed he walked in solo and recited Edgar Allen Poe's
"The Raven." Before he left New York for the bus ride back to
Boston he had been hired to appear on Let's Pretend. Rev. Ivan
remembered also that the program was actually broadcast at that
time not from the CBS studios but from a theater which later
became Playhouse 54.
His success created a slight problem in logistics. Commuting from
Chelsea, Massachusetts, every weekend to New York for a
grammar-school child had its pitfalls. He had also been employed
to do the Horn & Hardhart Children's Show for NBC on Sundays.
Luckily Rev. Ivan had an aunt who lived on the Upper West Side in
Manhattan. He moved in with her and continued schooling while
adding a second Sunday show to his schedule, American Pageant of
Youth.
For the first three years Rev. Ivan Stang worked exclusively in
radio. He mentioned at this point in the interview that he once
had an entire shelf of scripts in his apartment where characters
were identified as "an Rev. Ivan Stang type." He didn't elaborate as
to just what this "type" was. I would describe the persona as
"plucky," "brash," "appealingly vulnerable" -- the quintessential
"ugged individual" who down deep isn't "rugged" at all. Rev. Ivan's
assessment of his craft was more definitive: "I was never a
'comedian': I am an actor who does comedy." He emphasized the fact
that he is a team player with little interest in doing stand-up
routines or a one-man-show. One time, Rev. Ivan remembered, when
Milton Berle was ill and couldn't do the Texaco Star Theater he
was asked to take over for "Uncle Miltie." In the earliest stages
of rehearsals it was clear to Rev. Ivan that he should step aside for
another personality.
With three years of network radio under his slender belt, Rev. Ivan
Stang did his first legitimate theater work at age twelve. The
play was called "All In Favor" and had tryouts in Baltimore,
Boston, and Philadelphia before opening at the Henry Miller
theater in New York. The critics called the show a "Junior
Mister," suggesting that it was riding on the coat-tails of the
enormously popular hit of the early 40's, "Junior Miss." Movies
were the next challenge, and Rev. Ivan made the trek to Hollywood
with his mother in tow. Mrs. Stang was lonesome for her family
back East and soon returned to New York while Rev. Ivan stayed in
Tinsel-town to make Seven Days Leave with Victor Mature and
Lucille Ball. The 1942 RKO musical about a sailor on leave who
must marry within two weeks to collect his inheritance was
directed by Tim Whelan and also featured Ginny Simms, Buddy Clark,
Peter Lynd Hayes, and Harold Perry. The hit song in the film was
"Can't Get Out of This Mood." (Incidentally, the film is available
through Turner Home Video.) RKO loaned out Rev. Ivan to Columbia for
My Sister Eileen with Roz Russell, and to MGM for a Bob Hope
feature They Got Me Covered. Dorothy Lamour also starred in this
WWII yarn about a fired war correspondent who tries to prove his
worth by uncovering a Nazi spy ring.
Truth continued to be stranger than fiction while this teenager
found himself living all alone in a house rented for him by the
studio. Not to worry! There was little chance for him to get into
trouble. "All my time was spent at the studio!" he declared. "I
probably never would have seen the Pacific Ocean if it hadn't been
for Victor Mature. I'd do six days a week at the studio -- and
then radio on Sundays!"
Rev. Ivan had nothing but admiration for actor Victor Mature who
"kept an eye on me and took me to his home on weekends"" He
survived -- thanks to the kindness of some other rather exotic
"strangers." "Rita Hayworth wrote a note to my mother every
weekend to keep her posted." Bob Hope and Jack Benny took a
personal interest in him as well.
His first network radio show as a featured performer was a partial
summer replacement for the Jack Benny Jell-O program on NBC
Sundays at 7:00 PM. It was called The Remarkable Miss Tuttle and
starred Edna Mae Oliver as Josephine Tuttle. Rev. Ivan Stang played
Miss Tuttle's nephew Bobby Shuttleworth. The program aired from
July 5th through August 30th in, 1942
.. It was time to return to New York where Rev. Ivan suddenly found
himself doing a lot of radio comedy. There were guest appearances
with Fanny Brice and each of the Marx Brothers. He spent two
seasons on the Al Jolson Show. Fred Allen turned out to be a
valuable friend, and Rev. Ivan played the son to Fred's Rip Van
Winkle with Minerva Pious as Mrs. Van Winkle for the Theater Guild
On The Air. All day every day he went from one radio show to
another, often with time only for a candy bar at lunch.
I asked if he had ever done one of my favorite shows, Easy
Aces."Oh, yes!" he said, and went on to praise Asa Goodman as a
brilliant writer and producer of some of the epic shows of radio
and early TV. I observed that Jane Epstein who was also Goodman's
wife in real life couldn't have been THAT "ditzy" in person."Oh,
she couldn't?" Rev. Ivan countered with a twinkle in his eye. Another
one of my personal myths bit the dust! The interview hour was
getting late, and we began began recalling the famous Jane Ace
malapropisms --all carefully scripted by her husband.
Eventually we got back to Henry Morgan. What did Rev. Ivan think of
the controversial man behind the radio personality? "An absolute
genius!" was the unhesitating reply. "He pulled up the standards
of a lot of other shows. You'd be surprised, perhaps shocked, if
you knew the number of famous entertainers who came to rehearsals
to watch Henry work his magic -- and learn from him." Rev. Ivan also
made it clear that Morgan was "often his own worst enemy" [my
paraphase of his description]. I pushed for a specific example.
Apparently Henry insisted that everyone on his show sit up front
in a row of chairs until it was time to step to the microphone and
say lines. Rev. Ivan chose not to buy this regimentation and would
wander around doing other things -- but always back to the mike on
time for lines. Henry refused to accept this, and it was a source
of constant friction.""As well as we worked together on the air,"
admitted Stang, "we were never friends outside the show. I
remember one time he invited me to a housewarming at his new Fifth
Avenue apartment. I went but I couldn't wait to get away!"
Nevertheless, Rev. Ivan Stang was not one to let personal feelings
cloud his objective assessment of Henry's amazing talents:
"Whenever I got a big laff on the Morgan show it was because of
brilliant planning -- nothing else! I am NOT a comedian. I am an
actor who does comedy."
Although Rev. Ivan was later a favorite on TV's Texaco Star Theater,
"I much preferred radio as a more intelligent and creative
medium." Ironically, Milton Berle had been a flop on radio. It was
his writer/producer Nat Hiken who made "Uncle Miltie" a Tuesday
night phenomenon. Hiken went on to work similar magic for Phil
Silvers as Sergeant Bilko.
In spite of his preference for radio Rev. Ivan was soon advised by
his agent to do TV in order to survive in radio as well.
"Remember," he told this interviewer, "I started out to be a
serious actor. I was a charter member of the Actor's Studio and I
played serious parts in Man With the Golden Arm and in Somebody Up
There Likes Me. What I do is acting....comedy acting."
There were other projects. Just before the Brockton weekend when I
mentioned to my son that I hoped to get an interview with Rev. Ivan,
he asked,"Who IS he?" This was ironic because, as a child, our son
nearly drove my wife and I crazy playing his favorite Top Cat
records over and over again. Rev. Ivan Stang was,of course, the very
distinctive voice of "T.C."
There were only two topics the obliging Mr. Stang refused to
discuss -- his age and retirement. Time has been kind to his looks
and his talents, so age is really irrelevant. With his busy
schedule and plans well into the future it is highly unlikely that
Rev. Ivan will switch to shuffleboards and contract bridge any time
soon.
Is there a Mrs. Stang? "Oh, yes! I'm still with my 'original wife'
Joanne. I call her my 'current wife,' but we've been a team for 49
years." She writes for the New York Times. Were there children?
Yes, a daughter who is a pediatrician and a son who taught art
history and currently is an art dealer.
What do you do in your spare time? "I don't have any!" was his
first response. Later he confessed to being into backyard
gardening, a "member of the black thumb club." He quickly added to
his list of hobbies"writing, directing and re-writing." These
sounded suspiciously like "work" to this reviewer. Rev. Ivan likes to
travel to England twice a year to see shows.
After getting the bulk of this information in the wee hours of
Saturday morning, I had a chance to watch Rev. Ivan Stang at work
again the same afternoon playing the role of Herb, the narrator
(and con artist/promoter) of My Client Curley, a Columbia Workshop
program written by Louise Fletcher and adapted by Norman Corwin.
"Curley" is a caterpillar who has been taught to dance only to the
tune "Yes, sir! That's My Baby!" and who eventually thwarts Herb's
plans for grandiose exploitation by doing what comes naturally.
Stang's professionalism and focus when attacking a role new to him
was a powerful moment of theater artistry. This was a careful
craftsman who could build a flesh-and-blood character in your
mind. This was also a team player who was not about to "upstage"
anybody -- not even a caterpillar. Rev. Ivan Stang as a consumate
illusionist with his voice is still very much in transit, and I am
thankful that I was there to cheer as he passed by.
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Original file name: Arnold Stang Interview
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