Goodman Ace
Encyclopedia
Goodman Ace born Goodman Aiskowitz, was an American humourist, working as a radio writer and comedian
, a television writer, and a magazine columnist.
Ace's broadcasting career happened by accident, after one night of bridge and a following night of absenteeism, by the show that followed his wry movie reviews on a Kansas City radio station.
"Goody" (as he was known to friends) is not always the most recognisable writer/performer of his era by today's reader or listener, but his low-keyed, literate drollery and softly tart way of tweaking trends and pretenses made him one of the most sought-after writers in radio and television after he turned his attention to writing alone.
, the son of Latvian immigrants, Goodman Ace (he inverted his first non de plume, Asa Goodman) grew up wanting to write, proving it as the editor of his high school newspaper. Ace was also a roller skating
messenger for Montgomery Ward
while he studied journalism at Kansas City Polytechnic Institute
. He also wrote a weekly column called "The Dyspeptic" for the school newspaper. In due course, after also working at the post office and a local haberdashery to support his mother and sisters after his father's early death, he became a reporter and columnist for the Kansas City Journal-Post.
Jane Epstein
was his high school sweetheart; the problem for Ace was that the romance was one-sided until he became a local newspaper reporter. Jane wanted to attend the sold-out performance of Al Jolson
in Kansas City; her boyfriends were unable to get tickets, but Ace had access to the concert via his press pass. The Jolson concert was the couple's first date; they married six months later, in 1922.
But one night the recorded fifteen-minute show scheduled to air after Ace's timeslot failed to feed. With an immediate need to fill fifteen minutes' more airtime and his wife having accompanied him to the station that night, Ace slipped into an impromptu chat about a bridge game the couple played the previous weekend and invited Jane to join the chat which soon enough included discussion of a local murder case in which a wife murdered her husband over an argument about bridge. Loaded with Goodman's wry wit and Jane's knack for malaprops ("Would you care to shoot a game of bridge, dear?"), the couple's surprise improvisation provoked a response enthusiastic enough to convince KMBC to hand them a regular fifteen minute slot, creating and performing a "domestic comedy" of their own.
At first, the show that became known as Easy Aces
centered around the couple's bridge playing, according to John Dunning in On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): "Ace was not wild about Jane's bridge game, on the air or off, and he kept picking at her until she lost her temper and threatened to quit. The show settled into a new niche, a more universally based domestic comedy revolving around Jane's improbable situations and her impossible turns of phrase."
Written by Goodman Ace, who cast himself as a harried real estate salesman and the exasperated but loving husband of deceptively scatterbrained, malaprop-prone Jane ("You've got to take the bitter with the better"; "Time wounds all heels"), Easy Aces became a long-running serial comedy (1930–1945) and a low-keyed legend of old-time radio
for its literate, unobtrusive, conversational style and the malaprops of the female half of the team. The show was never a rating blockbuster, but according to Dunning it "was always a favourite of Radio Row insiders. Like Fred Allen
and Henry Morgan
, Ace was considered an intelligent man's wit. His show limped along [but] . . . lasted across several formats for more than fifteen years and was one of radio's fondest memories." The radio show was popular enough to get to the big screen; in 1934, the couple signed with Educational Pictures
for some two reel comedies. Dumb Luck was released January 18, 1935, with Goodman and Jane playing their radio characters. While writing Easy Aces, Ace also wrote for other radio shows, earning $3,000 per week in this way. In 1945, Ace signed on as one of the writers of The Danny Kaye Show. Previously he and Jane had been part of a series of celebrity guests who filled in for Kaye while he entertained the armed forces troops who were overseas. When Kaye moved his show from New York to Hollywood, Ace resigned. Whether writing for himself and Jane or for another performer, Ace's rating system of how well a script would do was based on the number of cigars he smoked while writing it. One cigar meant the show would do very well, while four cigars meant this program or episode was most likely hopeless. Ace was sued in 1940 because of the name he selected for a character. He used the first name of one of his staff coupled with the last name of another. Unknown to Ace, this resulted in the name of a real person who was publicly embarrassed by the use of his name on the show. He then began the practice of having those on the program use their own names for their characters.
In 1948, Ace created a new, half-hour version of the show, mr. ace and JANE; this expanded version, perhaps because a live studio audience detracted from its quiet style (a point made especially vivid by its audience-less, quiet audition show, and when new episodes expanded upon some of the old show's vintages), didn't last beyond a single season. And it fared no better on television. In 1956, both Ace and NBC thought seriously enough about another try for the television series to announce Ernie Kovacs
and his wife Edie Adams
would play the Aces in a pilot for the show; it is unknown whether the pilot took place.
Two decades after its brief, unsuccessful television adaptation, however, someone else was willing to give the Easy Aces idea a fresh television try: a number of the original Easy Aces radio scripts were adapted for the CTV Television Network
show The Trouble with Tracy
in 1971. The bad news: This version, apparently, was an unqualified disaster, perhaps because burgeoning feminism
looked askance at the Jane Ace type of character, but most likely because the cast performing the remade scripts just weren't the relaxed Mr. Ace and Jane.
The husband and wife team returned to network radio with the debut of NBC's Monitor
; the Aces were announced as "Communicators" just after Dave Garroway
's joining the show. They were also part of NBC Radio's Weekday, which was a Monday through Friday network offering aimed at women that premiered not long after Monitor. Ace branched out by writing commercials, featuring himself and Jane. The couple also voiced some commercials used on NBC's Startime
, while other actors played the visual roles.
network (also syndicated in some areas through Ziv Television Programs
) that ended in mid-June 1950, after airing Wednesday nights from 7:45-8:00 p.m., according to The Complete Directory to Prime Network TV Shows - 1946 to Present (First Edition). "As on radio," authors Tim Brooks
and Earle Marsh wrote, "Ace was his witty, intelligent self, and his wife, Jane, was a charming bundle of malapropisms". The television show included Betty Garde as Jane Ace's friend, Dorothy. What it didn't include, alas, was an audience equal to the ones who kept Easy Aces on radio for all those years, the ones who listened each week for that quiet drollery uninterrupted even by a studio audience. The demise of the show also meant the demise of the Aces' career in front of a microphone or camera. Jane Ace retired almost completely; Goodman Ace merely retired as a performer, becoming mainly a writer from 1949 forward.
Ace did have a serious side, too, and he melded it to his sense of the absurd to create a radio show with the twist of taking listeners to re-created historical events described by actual CBS News reporters. The problem, as revealed by CBS historian Robert Metz (in CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye), was that Ace didn't get official credit for his creation for many years; a CBS executive vice president named Desmond Taylor gained the original credit for the show born on radio as CBS Was There and famed (especially on television, with future anchor Walter Cronkite
narrating) for its introduction, which leapt into the American vernacular: "All things are as they were then, except you... are... there!"
, Perry Como
, Danny Kaye
, Robert Q. Lewis
, and Bob Newhart
were some who engaged this witty man with a winking inability to take himself too seriously. (He would be nominated for Emmy Awards twice during his term as Como's head writer, in 1956 and 1959.) Ace rationalized his work by saying, "I'm not in television. I'm with Perry Como." Perhaps his best turn of writing in these years, however, was his collaboration with Frank Wilson on The Big Show, considered NBC
's last-gasp attempt to keep classic radio alive. This 90-minute variety program was hosted by Tallulah Bankhead
and featured a rotating cast that included some of America's and the world's greatest entertainers, including Fred Allen
, Groucho Marx
, Jimmy Durante
, Joan Davis
, Bob Hope
, Louis Armstrong
, George Jessel
, Ethel Merman
, José Ferrer
, Ed Wynn
, Lauritz Melchior
, Ezio Pinza
, Édith Piaf
, Ginger Rogers
, Ethel Barrymore
, Phil Silvers
, Benny Goodman
, and Danny Thomas
. The show was ripened by Ace's wry style, adapted to Bankhead's diva-blunt style and the differing ways of the various guests who joined in the show. (Ace said years later that one of his secrets was isolating particular interests of the guests-for example, Ginger Rogers' passion for playing golf-and write comic routines around those interests.)
For his part Ace remembered working with Bankhead fondly in later years. "'You gentlemen, the authors,' she would say", Ace once told author Robert Metz. "We gag writers felt pretty good about that." What he didn't necessarily feel good about, as he told radio interviewers Richard Lamparski and John Dunning two decades later, was the writers' non-mention in Bankhead's memoir recollection about The Big Show.
Ace had known Jack Benny
since his Kansas City years. Radio historian Arthur Frank Wertheim recorded (in Radio Comedy) that, as a young newspaper reporter and columnist, Ace had written a witty gossip column that moved Benny himself to ask the young writer for some jokes for his stage act. Benny asked for more and paid Ace $50 for one packet of jokes. "Your jokes got lots of laughs", said the note Benny sent with the check. "If you have any more, send them along". Ace, according to Wertheim, returned the check with a note: "Your check got lots of laughs. If you have any more, send them along". Ace ended up supplying Benny with gags on the house for years, Wertheim noted.
Benny was inadvertently responsible for a very funny exchange of letters between Ace and the owner of the Stork Club
, Sherman Billingsley
. Benny invited him to lunch at the Stork; when Ace got to the club, Benny had not yet arrived. The staff at the Stork Club did not recognize Ace and he received a very cool reception. When Benny finally did get to the Stork, he was told Ace didn't want to wait and left. Soon Billingsley's notes began to arrive in Ace's mailbox, inviting him to come to the club for the marvelous air conditioning. Ace wrote back that he was well aware of how cool it was at the Stork, having received the cold shoulder there. Billingsley's response was a gift—bow ties for Ace. Ace's reply was to ask Billingsley for some matching socks so he would be well-dressed when he was refused admittance again.
Ace wrote one screenplay, I Married a Woman
, in 1957. Calling it the best thing he had ever written, but the worst thing he had ever seen after viewing the film, Ace never tried his hand at screenwriting again. When the couple's Miami hotel room was robbed in 1966, Ace managed to find humor in the situation.
Ace's influence went further. He revealed in the mid-1960s that CBS once developed a kind of school for young comedy writers, with Ace himself "placed in charge of a group of six or seven young writers who wanted to make all that easy money", as he recalled in a later magazine column. All became television writers and two eventually became successful playwrights: George Axelrod
(The Seven Year Itch
) and Neil Simon
(Barefoot in the Park
, The Odd Couple
, The Goodbye Girl
).
Later, Ace shifted to more broad contemporary concerns and called the column "Top of My Head"; these essays became as well-read as his old radio show had been, without being either too frivolous or too overbearing. Sometimes, they were gentle; sometimes, they were more tart, always they were without genuine malice. Often they included his beloved Jane, and they were strongly enough received to provoke two published collections, The Fine Art of Hypochondria; or, How Are You? and The Better of Goodman Ace.
As if suggesting that radio had never really left him, Ace assembled and published a collection of eight complete Easy Aces scripts, with new essays and comments from the Aces, as Ladies and Gentlemen-Easy Aces in 1970. He also held a small regular slot offering witty commentaries on New York station WPAT for a time, before going out over the full National Public Radio network during the 1970s.
Jane Ace died after a long illness in 1974, just days before what would have been their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Her husband's tribute to her in the 8 February 1975 issue ("Jane") provoked hundreds of letters from his regular readers and from the couple's old radio fans.
The author of CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye, Robert Metz, recalled that, once, a relative of Ace's had wired him to say, "Send me $10,000 or I'll jump from the fourteenth floor of my building", and Ace was said to have wired back, "Jump from seven--I'll send $5,000." Whether or not this was a true story or an Ace gag, it was understatedly madcap enough that it could have been true.
When CBS fired Ace as the head of its "comedy workshop" in the late 1940s, according to Time
, a sympathetic network vice president told him afterward, "I'll tell you a secret---we haven't got a man who understands comedy." Ace wryly replied, "I'll tell you a secret---that's no secret."
Ace himself offered his own best epitaph when Saturday Review ran a poll asking well-known Americans to nominate members of a contemporary Hall of Fame. "I respectfully suggest the name of Goodman Ace...if he's still around", Ace replied. "If he isn't, I wouldn't dig him up just for this." The National Radio Hall of Fame respectfully ignored that suggestion, inducting Easy Aces in 1990.
Comedian
A comedian or comic is a person who seeks to entertain an audience, primarily by making them laugh. This might be through jokes or amusing situations, or acting a fool, as in slapstick, or employing prop comedy...
, a television writer, and a magazine columnist.
Ace's broadcasting career happened by accident, after one night of bridge and a following night of absenteeism, by the show that followed his wry movie reviews on a Kansas City radio station.
"Goody" (as he was known to friends) is not always the most recognisable writer/performer of his era by today's reader or listener, but his low-keyed, literate drollery and softly tart way of tweaking trends and pretenses made him one of the most sought-after writers in radio and television after he turned his attention to writing alone.
Early years
Born in Kansas City, MissouriKansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...
, the son of Latvian immigrants, Goodman Ace (he inverted his first non de plume, Asa Goodman) grew up wanting to write, proving it as the editor of his high school newspaper. Ace was also a roller skating
Roller skating
Roller skating is the traveling on smooth surfaces with roller skates. It is a form of recreation as well as a sport, and can also be a form of transportation. Skates generally come in two basic varieties: quad roller skates and inline skates or blades, though some have experimented with a...
messenger for Montgomery Ward
Montgomery Ward
Montgomery Ward is an online retailer that carries the same name as the former American department store chain, founded as the world's #1 mail order business in 1872 by Aaron Montgomery Ward, and which went out of business in 2001...
while he studied journalism at Kansas City Polytechnic Institute
Metropolitan Community College (Kansas City)
Metropolitan Community College is a community college system in Missouri, United States. The system consists of five separate campuses located in Kansas City, Independence, and Lee's Summit. The five campuses have a total enrollment of over 21,000 students per semester...
. He also wrote a weekly column called "The Dyspeptic" for the school newspaper. In due course, after also working at the post office and a local haberdashery to support his mother and sisters after his father's early death, he became a reporter and columnist for the Kansas City Journal-Post.
Jane Epstein
Jane Ace
Jane Ace was the high-voiced, malaprop-mastering wife on legendary, low-keyed American radio comedy Easy Aces...
was his high school sweetheart; the problem for Ace was that the romance was one-sided until he became a local newspaper reporter. Jane wanted to attend the sold-out performance of Al Jolson
Al Jolson
Al Jolson was an American singer, comedian and actor. In his heyday, he was dubbed "The World's Greatest Entertainer"....
in Kansas City; her boyfriends were unable to get tickets, but Ace had access to the concert via his press pass. The Jolson concert was the couple's first date; they married six months later, in 1922.
Radio aces
In 1930, Ace took on a second job reading the Sunday comics on radio station KMBC (anticipating the famous newspaper strike stunt, almost two decades later, by legendary New York mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia) and hosting a Friday night film review and gossip program called Ace Goes to the Movies. Ace was not initially a volunteer for the job. An editor at the Journal-Post had the idea that having an employee read the newspaper's comics on the air for children would increase circulation for the paper. Taking the job meant an extra $10 per week in one's paycheck, but none of the newsroom staff was interested. The editor, reasoning that since Ace's current assignment was covering local theater, insisted he would be the perfect man for the job. Ace suggested a second radio show, this one dealing with films, thus collecting an additional $10 per week.But one night the recorded fifteen-minute show scheduled to air after Ace's timeslot failed to feed. With an immediate need to fill fifteen minutes' more airtime and his wife having accompanied him to the station that night, Ace slipped into an impromptu chat about a bridge game the couple played the previous weekend and invited Jane to join the chat which soon enough included discussion of a local murder case in which a wife murdered her husband over an argument about bridge. Loaded with Goodman's wry wit and Jane's knack for malaprops ("Would you care to shoot a game of bridge, dear?"), the couple's surprise improvisation provoked a response enthusiastic enough to convince KMBC to hand them a regular fifteen minute slot, creating and performing a "domestic comedy" of their own.
At first, the show that became known as Easy Aces
Easy Aces
Easy Aces, a long-running American serial radio comedy , was trademarked by the low-keyed drollery of creator and writer Goodman Ace and his wife, Jane, as an urbane, put-upon realtor and his malaprop-prone wife...
centered around the couple's bridge playing, according to John Dunning in On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): "Ace was not wild about Jane's bridge game, on the air or off, and he kept picking at her until she lost her temper and threatened to quit. The show settled into a new niche, a more universally based domestic comedy revolving around Jane's improbable situations and her impossible turns of phrase."
Written by Goodman Ace, who cast himself as a harried real estate salesman and the exasperated but loving husband of deceptively scatterbrained, malaprop-prone Jane ("You've got to take the bitter with the better"; "Time wounds all heels"), Easy Aces became a long-running serial comedy (1930–1945) and a low-keyed legend of old-time radio
Old-time radio
Old-Time Radio and the Golden Age of Radio refer to a period of radio programming in the United States lasting from the proliferation of radio broadcasting in the early 1920s until television's replacement of radio as the primary home entertainment medium in the 1950s...
for its literate, unobtrusive, conversational style and the malaprops of the female half of the team. The show was never a rating blockbuster, but according to Dunning it "was always a favourite of Radio Row insiders. Like Fred Allen
Fred Allen
Fred Allen was an American comedian whose absurdist, topically pointed radio show made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humorists in the so-called classic era of American radio.His best-remembered gag was his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but it...
and Henry Morgan
Henry Morgan (comedian)
Henry Morgan was an American humorist. He is remembered best in two modern media: radio, on which he first became familiar as a barbed but often self-deprecating satirist, and on television, where he was a regular and cantankerous panelist for the game show I've Got a Secret...
, Ace was considered an intelligent man's wit. His show limped along [but] . . . lasted across several formats for more than fifteen years and was one of radio's fondest memories." The radio show was popular enough to get to the big screen; in 1934, the couple signed with Educational Pictures
Educational Pictures
Educational Pictures was a film distribution company founded in 1919 by Earle Hammons . Educational primarily distributed short subjects, and today is probably best known for its series of 1930s comedies starring Buster Keaton, as well as for a series of one-reel comedies featuring Shirley...
for some two reel comedies. Dumb Luck was released January 18, 1935, with Goodman and Jane playing their radio characters. While writing Easy Aces, Ace also wrote for other radio shows, earning $3,000 per week in this way. In 1945, Ace signed on as one of the writers of The Danny Kaye Show. Previously he and Jane had been part of a series of celebrity guests who filled in for Kaye while he entertained the armed forces troops who were overseas. When Kaye moved his show from New York to Hollywood, Ace resigned. Whether writing for himself and Jane or for another performer, Ace's rating system of how well a script would do was based on the number of cigars he smoked while writing it. One cigar meant the show would do very well, while four cigars meant this program or episode was most likely hopeless. Ace was sued in 1940 because of the name he selected for a character. He used the first name of one of his staff coupled with the last name of another. Unknown to Ace, this resulted in the name of a real person who was publicly embarrassed by the use of his name on the show. He then began the practice of having those on the program use their own names for their characters.
In 1948, Ace created a new, half-hour version of the show, mr. ace and JANE; this expanded version, perhaps because a live studio audience detracted from its quiet style (a point made especially vivid by its audience-less, quiet audition show, and when new episodes expanded upon some of the old show's vintages), didn't last beyond a single season. And it fared no better on television. In 1956, both Ace and NBC thought seriously enough about another try for the television series to announce Ernie Kovacs
Ernie Kovacs
Ernie Kovacs was a Hungarian American comedian and actor.Kovacs' uninhibited, often ad-libbed, and visually experimental comedic style came to influence numerous television comedy programs for years after his death in an automobile accident...
and his wife Edie Adams
Edie Adams
Edie Adams was an American singer, Broadway, television and film actress and comedienne. Adams, a Tony Award winner, "both embodied and winked at the stereotypes of fetching chanteuse and sexpot blonde." She was well-known for her impersonations of female stars on stage and television, most...
would play the Aces in a pilot for the show; it is unknown whether the pilot took place.
Two decades after its brief, unsuccessful television adaptation, however, someone else was willing to give the Easy Aces idea a fresh television try: a number of the original Easy Aces radio scripts were adapted for the CTV Television Network
CTV television network
CTV Television Network is a Canadian English language television network and is owned by Bell Media. It is Canada's largest privately-owned network, and has consistently placed as Canada's top-rated network in total viewers and in key demographics since 2002, after several years trailing the rival...
show The Trouble with Tracy
The Trouble with Tracy
The Trouble with Tracy was a Canadian television series produced by CTV for the 1970–1971 television season, with intended distribution by the U.S.-based National General Pictures. It is considered by some to be one of the worst situation comedies ever produced.The show was produced as a daily...
in 1971. The bad news: This version, apparently, was an unqualified disaster, perhaps because burgeoning feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
looked askance at the Jane Ace type of character, but most likely because the cast performing the remade scripts just weren't the relaxed Mr. Ace and Jane.
The husband and wife team returned to network radio with the debut of NBC's Monitor
Monitor (NBC Radio)
NBC Monitor was an American weekend radio program broadcast from June 12, 1955, until January 26, 1975. Airing live and nationwide on the NBC Radio Network, it originally aired beginning Saturday morning at 8am and continuing through the weekend until 12 midnight on Sunday...
; the Aces were announced as "Communicators" just after Dave Garroway
Dave Garroway
David Cunningham "Dave" Garroway was the founding host of NBC's Today from 1952 to 1961. His easygoing, relaxed, and relaxing style belied a battle with depression that may have contributed to the end of his days as a leading television personality—and, eventually, his life...
's joining the show. They were also part of NBC Radio's Weekday, which was a Monday through Friday network offering aimed at women that premiered not long after Monitor. Ace branched out by writing commercials, featuring himself and Jane. The couple also voiced some commercials used on NBC's Startime
Startime (TV series)
Startime is an anthology show of drama, comedy, and variety, and was one of the first American television shows broadcast in color. The program was aired Tuesday nights in the United States on the NBC Television network in the 1959-60 television season....
, while other actors played the visual roles.
"Terrible Vaudeville": You Are There
Ace may have needled TV as "terrible vaudeville," but he wasn't averse to giving television a try. The couple adapted Easy Aces to television in December 1949, with a fifteen-minute filmed version on the DuMontDuMont Television Network
The DuMont Television Network, also known as the DuMont Network, DuMont, Du Mont, or Dumont was one of the world's pioneer commercial television networks, rivalling NBC for the distinction of being first overall. It began operation in the United States in 1946. It was owned by DuMont...
network (also syndicated in some areas through Ziv Television Programs
Ziv Television Programs
Ziv Television Programs, Inc. was an American television syndication and production company, producer of popular syndicated TV programs in the 1950s.- History :...
) that ended in mid-June 1950, after airing Wednesday nights from 7:45-8:00 p.m., according to The Complete Directory to Prime Network TV Shows - 1946 to Present (First Edition). "As on radio," authors Tim Brooks
Tim Brooks (television historian)
Tim Brooks is an American television and radio historian, author and retired television executive. He is credited with having helped launch the Sci Fi Channel in 1992 as well as other USA Network projects and channels....
and Earle Marsh wrote, "Ace was his witty, intelligent self, and his wife, Jane, was a charming bundle of malapropisms". The television show included Betty Garde as Jane Ace's friend, Dorothy. What it didn't include, alas, was an audience equal to the ones who kept Easy Aces on radio for all those years, the ones who listened each week for that quiet drollery uninterrupted even by a studio audience. The demise of the show also meant the demise of the Aces' career in front of a microphone or camera. Jane Ace retired almost completely; Goodman Ace merely retired as a performer, becoming mainly a writer from 1949 forward.
Ace did have a serious side, too, and he melded it to his sense of the absurd to create a radio show with the twist of taking listeners to re-created historical events described by actual CBS News reporters. The problem, as revealed by CBS historian Robert Metz (in CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye), was that Ace didn't get official credit for his creation for many years; a CBS executive vice president named Desmond Taylor gained the original credit for the show born on radio as CBS Was There and famed (especially on television, with future anchor Walter Cronkite
Walter Cronkite
Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. was an American broadcast journalist, best known as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years . During the heyday of CBS News in the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll...
narrating) for its introduction, which leapt into the American vernacular: "All things are as they were then, except you... are... there!"
"You Gentlemen, The Authors"
By this time, however, Ace began writing for other performers; Milton BerleMilton Berle
Milton Berlinger , better known as Milton Berle, was an American comedian and actor. As the manic host of NBC's Texaco Star Theater , in 1948 he was the first major star of U.S. television and as such became known as Uncle Miltie and Mr...
, Perry Como
Perry Como
Pierino Ronald "Perry" Como was an American singer and television personality. During a career spanning more than half a century he recorded exclusively for the RCA Victor label after signing with them in 1943. "Mr...
, Danny Kaye
Danny Kaye
Danny Kaye was a celebrated American actor, singer, dancer, and comedian...
, Robert Q. Lewis
Robert Q. Lewis
Robert Q. Lewis was an American radio and television personality, game show host, and actor. Lewis added the middle initial "Q." to his name accidentally on the air in 1942, when he responded to a reference to radio comedian F. Chase Taylor's character, Colonel Lemuel Q...
, and Bob Newhart
Bob Newhart
George Robert Newhart , known professionally as Bob Newhart, is an American stand-up comedian and actor. Noted for his deadpan and slightly stammering delivery, Newhart came to prominence in the 1960s when his album of comedic monologues The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart was a worldwide...
were some who engaged this witty man with a winking inability to take himself too seriously. (He would be nominated for Emmy Awards twice during his term as Como's head writer, in 1956 and 1959.) Ace rationalized his work by saying, "I'm not in television. I'm with Perry Como." Perhaps his best turn of writing in these years, however, was his collaboration with Frank Wilson on The Big Show, considered NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
's last-gasp attempt to keep classic radio alive. This 90-minute variety program was hosted by Tallulah Bankhead
Tallulah Bankhead
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was an award-winning American actress of the stage and screen, talk-show host, and bonne vivante...
and featured a rotating cast that included some of America's and the world's greatest entertainers, including Fred Allen
Fred Allen
Fred Allen was an American comedian whose absurdist, topically pointed radio show made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humorists in the so-called classic era of American radio.His best-remembered gag was his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but it...
, Groucho Marx
Groucho Marx
Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx was an American comedian and film star famed as a master of wit. His rapid-fire delivery of innuendo-laden patter earned him many admirers. He made 13 feature films with his siblings the Marx Brothers, of whom he was the third-born...
, Jimmy Durante
Jimmy Durante
James Francis "Jimmy" Durante was an American singer, pianist, comedian and actor. His distinctive clipped gravelly speech, comic language butchery, jazz-influenced songs, and large nose helped make him one of America's most familiar and popular personalities of the 1920s through the 1970s...
, Joan Davis
Joan Davis
Joan Davis was an American comedic actress whose career spanned vaudeville, film, radio and television. Remembered best for the 1950s television comedy, I Married Joan, Davis had a successful earlier career as a B-movie actress and a leading star of 1940s radio comedy.Born as Madonna Josephine...
, Bob Hope
Bob Hope
Bob Hope, KBE, KCSG, KSS was a British-born American comedian and actor who appeared in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in radio, television and movies. He was also noted for his work with the US Armed Forces and his numerous USO shows entertaining American military personnel...
, Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong , nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana....
, George Jessel
George Jessel (actor)
George Albert Jessel was an American illustrated song "model," actor, singer, songwriter, and Academy Award-winning movie producer. He was famous in his lifetime as a multitalented comedic entertainer, achieving a level of recognition that transcended his limited roles in movies...
, Ethel Merman
Ethel Merman
Ethel Merman was an American actress and singer. Known primarily for her powerful voice and roles in musical theatre, she has been called "the undisputed First Lady of the musical comedy stage." Among the many standards introduced by Merman in Broadway musicals are "I Got Rhythm", "Everything's...
, José Ferrer
José Ferrer
José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón , best known as José Ferrer, was a Puerto Rican actor, as well as a theater and film director...
, Ed Wynn
Ed Wynn
Ed Wynn was a popular American comedian and actor noted for his Perfect Fool comedy character, his pioneering radio show of the 1930s, and his later career as a dramatic actor....
, Lauritz Melchior
Lauritz Melchior
Lauritz Melchior was a Danish and later American opera singer. He was the pre-eminent Wagnerian tenor of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and has since come to be considered the quintessence of his voice type.-Biography:...
, Ezio Pinza
Ezio Pinza
Ezio Pinza was an Italian basso opera singer with a rich, smooth and sonorous voice. He spent 22 seasons at New York's Metropolitan Opera, appearing in more than 750 performances of 50 operas...
, Édith Piaf
Édith Piaf
Édith Piaf , born Édith Giovanna Gassion, was a French singer and cultural icon who became widely regarded as France's greatest popular singer. Her singing reflected her life, with her specialty being ballads...
, Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers was an American actress, dancer, and singer who appeared in film, and on stage, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century....
, Ethel Barrymore
Ethel Barrymore
Ethel Barrymore was an American actress and a member of the Barrymore family of actors.-Early life:Ethel Barrymore was born Ethel Mae Blythe in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the second child of the actors Maurice Barrymore and Georgiana Drew...
, Phil Silvers
Phil Silvers
Phil Silvers was an American entertainer and comedy actor, known as "The King of Chutzpah." He is best known for starring in The Phil Silvers Show, a 1950s sitcom set on a U.S...
, Benny Goodman
Benny Goodman
Benjamin David “Benny” Goodman was an American jazz and swing musician, clarinetist and bandleader; widely known as the "King of Swing".In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman led one of the most popular musical groups in America...
, and Danny Thomas
Danny Thomas
Danny Thomas was an American nightclub comedian and television and film actor, best known for starring in the television sitcom Make Room for Daddy . He was also the founder of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital...
. The show was ripened by Ace's wry style, adapted to Bankhead's diva-blunt style and the differing ways of the various guests who joined in the show. (Ace said years later that one of his secrets was isolating particular interests of the guests-for example, Ginger Rogers' passion for playing golf-and write comic routines around those interests.)
For his part Ace remembered working with Bankhead fondly in later years. "'You gentlemen, the authors,' she would say", Ace once told author Robert Metz. "We gag writers felt pretty good about that." What he didn't necessarily feel good about, as he told radio interviewers Richard Lamparski and John Dunning two decades later, was the writers' non-mention in Bankhead's memoir recollection about The Big Show.
Ace had known Jack Benny
Jack Benny
Jack Benny was an American comedian, vaudevillian, and actor for radio, television, and film...
since his Kansas City years. Radio historian Arthur Frank Wertheim recorded (in Radio Comedy) that, as a young newspaper reporter and columnist, Ace had written a witty gossip column that moved Benny himself to ask the young writer for some jokes for his stage act. Benny asked for more and paid Ace $50 for one packet of jokes. "Your jokes got lots of laughs", said the note Benny sent with the check. "If you have any more, send them along". Ace, according to Wertheim, returned the check with a note: "Your check got lots of laughs. If you have any more, send them along". Ace ended up supplying Benny with gags on the house for years, Wertheim noted.
Benny was inadvertently responsible for a very funny exchange of letters between Ace and the owner of the Stork Club
Stork Club
The Stork Club was a nightclub in New York City from 1929 to 1965. From 1934 onwards, it was located at 3 East 53rd Street, just east of Fifth Avenue...
, Sherman Billingsley
Sherman Billingsley
Sherman Billingsley was an American nightclub owner and former bootlegger who was the founder and owner of New York's Stork Club....
. Benny invited him to lunch at the Stork; when Ace got to the club, Benny had not yet arrived. The staff at the Stork Club did not recognize Ace and he received a very cool reception. When Benny finally did get to the Stork, he was told Ace didn't want to wait and left. Soon Billingsley's notes began to arrive in Ace's mailbox, inviting him to come to the club for the marvelous air conditioning. Ace wrote back that he was well aware of how cool it was at the Stork, having received the cold shoulder there. Billingsley's response was a gift—bow ties for Ace. Ace's reply was to ask Billingsley for some matching socks so he would be well-dressed when he was refused admittance again.
Ace wrote one screenplay, I Married a Woman
I Married a Woman
I Married a Woman is a 1958 film made in 1956, starring Diana Dors and George Gobel. It also features John Wayne in a cameo role as himself. It was filmed in RKO-Scope and black and white except for one of Wayne's two scenes, which was shot in Technicolor...
, in 1957. Calling it the best thing he had ever written, but the worst thing he had ever seen after viewing the film, Ace never tried his hand at screenwriting again. When the couple's Miami hotel room was robbed in 1966, Ace managed to find humor in the situation.
Ace's influence went further. He revealed in the mid-1960s that CBS once developed a kind of school for young comedy writers, with Ace himself "placed in charge of a group of six or seven young writers who wanted to make all that easy money", as he recalled in a later magazine column. All became television writers and two eventually became successful playwrights: George Axelrod
George Axelrod
George Axelrod was an American screenwriter, producer, playwright and film director, best known for his play, The Seven Year Itch , which was adapted into a movie of the same name starring Marilyn Monroe...
(The Seven Year Itch
The Seven Year Itch
The Seven Year Itch is a 1955 American film based on a three-act play with the same name by George Axelrod. The film was co-written and directed by Billy Wilder, and starred Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, reprising his Broadway role...
) and Neil Simon
Neil Simon
Neil Simon is an American playwright and screenwriter. He has written numerous Broadway plays, including Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and The Odd Couple. He won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Lost In Yonkers. He has written the screenplays for several of his plays that...
(Barefoot in the Park
Barefoot in the Park
This article is about the Broadway production. For the film adaptation see Barefoot in the Park .Barefoot in the Park is a romantic comedy by Neil Simon. The original Broadway production, directed by Mike Nichols, opened October 23, 1963, with the four lead roles taken by actors Elizabeth Ashley ,...
, The Odd Couple
The Odd Couple
The Odd Couple is a 1965 Broadway play by Neil Simon, followed by a successful film and television series, as well as other derivative works and spin offs, many featuring one or more of the same actors. The plot concerns two mismatched roommates, one neat and uptight, the other more easygoing and...
, The Goodbye Girl
The Goodbye Girl
The Goodbye Girl is a 1977 American romantic comedy-drama film. Directed by Herbert Ross, the film stars Richard Dreyfuss, Marsha Mason, Quinn Cummings, and Paul Benedict...
).
The Saturday Reviewer
Ace became a regular columnist for Saturday Review (formerly The Saturday Review of Literature; he liked to suggest cause-and-effect in the magazine's name changing two weeks after his debut in its pages) in the early 1950s. At first, he focused---in what a publisher described (considering his parallel employment writing for television) as "nibbling the hand that feeds him"-on television criticism in his usual droll style; a collection of this criticism was published in 1955 as The Book of Little Knowledge: More Than You Want to Know About Television.Later, Ace shifted to more broad contemporary concerns and called the column "Top of My Head"; these essays became as well-read as his old radio show had been, without being either too frivolous or too overbearing. Sometimes, they were gentle; sometimes, they were more tart, always they were without genuine malice. Often they included his beloved Jane, and they were strongly enough received to provoke two published collections, The Fine Art of Hypochondria; or, How Are You? and The Better of Goodman Ace.
As if suggesting that radio had never really left him, Ace assembled and published a collection of eight complete Easy Aces scripts, with new essays and comments from the Aces, as Ladies and Gentlemen-Easy Aces in 1970. He also held a small regular slot offering witty commentaries on New York station WPAT for a time, before going out over the full National Public Radio network during the 1970s.
Jane Ace died after a long illness in 1974, just days before what would have been their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Her husband's tribute to her in the 8 February 1975 issue ("Jane") provoked hundreds of letters from his regular readers and from the couple's old radio fans.
"...now alone at a funeral home...the questions...the softly spoken suggestions...repeated, and repeated... because ...because during all the arrangements, through my mind there ran a constant rerun, a line she spoke on radio...on the brotherhood of man ...in her casual, malapropian style ... "we are all cremated equal" ... they kept urging for an answer...a wooden casket? ... a metal casket? ...it's the name of their game ... a tisket a casket...and then transporting it to Kansas City, Mo. ...the plane ride..."smoking or non-smoking section?" somebody asked ... the non-thinking section was what I wanted....
"...a soft sprinkle of snow as we huddled around her...the first of the season, they told me ... lasted only through the short service ...snow stopped the instant the last words were spoken. He had the grace to celebrate her arrival with a handful of His confetti ..."
Goodbye, Goody
Goodman Ace died eight years after his wife, in their New York City home in March 1982; the couple are interred together in a suburb of their native Kansas City. "Mr. Ace", wrote The New York Times's obituarist, David Bird, "liked to scoff at ratings. He said that neither the writer nor a star alone could make or break a comedy show. It took, he said, a good time spot and teamwork. 'The whole thing has to be a kind of partnership -- a marriage between writer and performer,' he explained, 'If there is no marriage -- well you know what the brainchild has to be'."The author of CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye, Robert Metz, recalled that, once, a relative of Ace's had wired him to say, "Send me $10,000 or I'll jump from the fourteenth floor of my building", and Ace was said to have wired back, "Jump from seven--I'll send $5,000." Whether or not this was a true story or an Ace gag, it was understatedly madcap enough that it could have been true.
When CBS fired Ace as the head of its "comedy workshop" in the late 1940s, according to Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
, a sympathetic network vice president told him afterward, "I'll tell you a secret---we haven't got a man who understands comedy." Ace wryly replied, "I'll tell you a secret---that's no secret."
Ace himself offered his own best epitaph when Saturday Review ran a poll asking well-known Americans to nominate members of a contemporary Hall of Fame. "I respectfully suggest the name of Goodman Ace...if he's still around", Ace replied. "If he isn't, I wouldn't dig him up just for this." The National Radio Hall of Fame respectfully ignored that suggestion, inducting Easy Aces in 1990.
External links
- "The Late, Great Goodman Ace"
- "The Friars Club"
- Goodman and Jane Ace Home-Radio Television Mirror May 1941-(page 15)
- If Lincoln Had Been on TV Goodman Ace January 29, 1954
Listen
- Easy Aces and mr. ace and JANE episodes Old Time Radio-OTR
- Mr. Ace and Jane Radio Shows at Internet Archives
- Easy Aces Episode at Original Old Radio