The Great One
Henry, William A. III
T here are cycles creators go through. First they die, in an atmosphere of sentimental tribute. After a while, there comes stage two, the unmasking biography that details every bender, fight, and...
...his peppery, bright wife Alice...
...In the first place, it was precisely Gleason's cultural and religious and personal inhibiTHE GREAT ONE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JACKIE GLEASON William A. Henry III Doubleday/321 pages/$22.50 reviewed by DONALD LYONS 60 The American Spectator September 1992 tions against "psychoanalytic speculation" and "meaningful discussion" of his familial traumas that left them ready in his psyche as raw material for his art...
...Throughout his career, he remained a happy-endings man...
...Gleason himself recalled their dwelling as "just a round table and an icebox and a bureau that everything went into...
...Imagine Ralph Kramden arguing with Norton about Suez or Little Rock...
...The rest of Gleason's life—apart from such bright spots as his performance in The Hustler—is a monotonous and stupefying parade of megalomania, gluttony, and drink, with fitful gleams of grace...
...It is hard to imagine a tell-all posthumous biography of Norman Mailer that will tell much new...
...This is how artists work...
...they ferociously yank about and lyingly reshape their shameful memories...
...Trust the tale, not the teller, as D.H...
...The light bulbs were never very bright and the rooms were always bare...
...Henry slogs dutifully on (though without, be it noted, the possibly softening contributions of Gleason's daughters or wives) but might have made better use of some of his space giving dates, casts, and plots of the Golden Thirty-Nine (at least...
...Henry bestows lavish praise on "The Honeymooners" ("great dramatic art . . . heightened reality") but seems to think Gleason should have taken his art elsewhere: "Gleason did not aspire . . . to dark and unsettling art...
...In many instances today, of course, the cycle starts to work during the subject's lifetime...
...they transmute private—and, as such, uninteresting—suffering into public shapes...
...Gleason "largely eluded meaningful discussion of his relationships with his parents...
...Never mind "The Honeymooners...
...this would involve deceit, misunderstanding, and anger, but always final, resolving forgiveness and love...
...In the world in which he was raised, to criticize one's relations . . . was an unpardonable breach of taste...
...Jackie Gleason was, after sordid years as a comic in sleazy clubs and as a minor player in films, to come into his own in the postwar springtime of television, nursery of such loud, raucous, angular characters as Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and Lucille Ball (to name the best...
...After a while, there comes stage two, the unmasking biography that details every bender, fight, and betrayal...
...The programs remain, to this day, the jewel in the crown of American television—a dream marriage of artists and historical moment (the Glorious Fifties...
...The first clone of "The Honeymooners" was "All in the Family," inferior not least because ideologized...
...Pa and Ma and Jackie in some sense resulted in the Kramdens...
...William Henry scolds Jackie for letting his exhausted mother fix their suppers unaided all those evenings ago, but he also refuses to let Jackie rose-tint his mother's character...
...The old Gleason flat became the Kramden apartment (that description above will surely have rung a bell with lovers of the show...
...in the classic shows Audrey Meadows was Alice...
...Poor Jackie was born in Irish Brooklyn in 1916 to battling parents—a feckless and alcoholic father who vanished when Jackie was 10 and was never seen again...
...He contrasts Sergeant Bilko's dealings with race relations to the refusal of "The Honeymooners" to acknowledge "the ethnic stew that was Brooklyn" (do stews melt...
...and begin the thirty-nine immortal black-and-white half-hour episodes...
...Henry notes that "Jackie Gleason never let himself get drawn into discussions of the larger implications of Ralph Kramden's yearning for recognition" or "the larger meaning of Alice Kramden's unyielding insistence on her equality" or the "political agenda in his depiction of the poverty and thwarted materialism of the working classes...
...Psychobabble is the death of song...
...and an anxious, worn mother who then got a job making change at a BMT subway station, where she had to stand for her whole shift in a booth neither heated in winter nor cooled in summer...
...They do not get in touch with their "inner selves...
...and upstairs neighbors Ed Norton, a goofily lovable sewer worker, and his sane wife Trixie...
...Prime time is blatant Kulturkampf...
...For the rest of his TV career, Gleason tried to recapture these glories of 1955-56...
...Law" or "Murphy Brown" or "Beverly Hills, 90210" must—is it in the contract?—deal with either AIDS or racism or condoms or sexual harassment or the televisually challenged or (get ready) the L.A...
...Only in October 1955 did Gleason extract "The Honeymooners" from the context of his other, often inspired character sketches (the Poor Soul, Reggie van Gleason III, etc...
...And happy endings can be not moronic, but profound...
...His is not a story particularly worth knowing (any more than is, say, Hemingway's...
...Gleason was Ralph...
...The job barely kept the two in a small, dismal apartment...
...He cites Gleason's "deep distaste for any psychoanalytic speculation, especially when it involved other members of his family...
...Joyce Randolph was Trixie—let the Muses sound the four names forever...
...Only compare yesterday's "Mary Tyler Moore Show" (hardly the brainchild of traditionalists) to "Murphy Brown" to gauge the damage wrought in popular art by ideology...
...In this sense, the restraints exercised by the networks in the 1950s on what was publicly sayable made for healthy art, just as today's license makes for the reverse...
...riots...
...Perhaps," he grants, "the careworn, Donald Lyons is a writer living in New York...
...But she was a good mother, and things were very pleasant, with a lot of affection...
...The frequent thrust of the episodes was Ralph's effort to better himself and give Alice a better life...
...After another while, in stage three, a more balanced account appears, and attention begins to shift back to the work...
...n all this, Henry misses the boat— and he misses it twice...
...But Henry ain't really buying it...
...Lawrence said...
...the sublime Art Carney was Ed...
...Importantly, all witnesses agree that Gleason, who had a habit of claiming responsibility for everything he touched, was for once right in claiming "authorship" of the Kramdens...
...As for the dearth of topicality in Kramdenland . . . Look at TV today, where each episode of "L.A...
...drunken, and angry woman was also gentle, intuitive and kind...
...With Jackie Gleason, we are at stage two...
...In September 1952, CBS gave Gleason a variety hour, on which the most successful recurring sketch was "The Honeymooners," a tough comedy about four tough Brooklynites: Ralph Kramden, a fat busdriver...
Vol. 25 • September 1992 • No. 9
