STEVERINO -- TELEVISION'S WISEST WIT
MANHATTAN, SEPT. 27, 1954, 11:30 p.m. — On a stage just off Broadway, a tall, bespectacled man sits at a piano. “This is Tonight,” he announces, “and I want to give you the bad news first: This program is going to go on forever. You think you're tired now, wait until you see one o'clock roll around!"
Here in TV’s Golden Age, the “vast wasteland” is rising. Game shows, Westerns, sitcoms. . . But Steve Allen will stand alone in the wasteland, not just for creating “The Tonight Show” but for mixing comedy with intelligence, wit with music.
Allen’s “Tonight,” George Carlin remembered, was “crashing, cascading brilliance.” And Allen, author of 50 books, composer of 8,000 songs, was, one TV critic recalled, a “serious man trapped in a vaudevillian’s body.”
He was born into this, in 1921. His mother, Isabelle, Milton Berle recalled, was “the funniest woman in vaudeville.” His father, Billy, was her sidekick. But Billy died when Steve was a toddler. Shipped to his mother’s family in Chicago, he was “a pampered beanpole” raised by relatives “sarcastic, volatile, sometimes disparaging, but very, very funny.''
During the Depression, Allen ran away from home, settling in Phoenix. Dropping out of college, he got a job in radio. He soon drifted to L.A. where, after the war, he found a home on TV. Early TV was radio with a camera on it, and the glib Allen probed its possibilities. Announcing wrestling: “Leone gives Smith a full nelson now, slipping it up from either a half-nelson or an Ozzie Nelson.”
While hosting a local talk show, Allen subbed on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” Commercials were live, and Allen made instant soup, then poured it into Godfrey’s ukulele. “The guy’s a natural for the big time,” Variety wrote, and by 1950, “The Steve Allen Show” was a morning favorite on CBS.
But TV was stretching into American life, and when NBC stretched into “late night,” Allen got the gig. He only hosted “Tonight” for three years but he left a lasting mark on a show that has run “forever.”
Audiences never knew what Allen would do next. Dressed in a police uniform, he left the studio, hailed a taxi, threw a salami in the back and told the driver, “take this to Grand Central Station.” He made prank phone calls and read Letters to the Editor aloud, with mock outrage.
Then there was his music. At the piano, which he played by ear, Allen invited people to tap single keys, then improvised a song from the unlikely melody. But it was during a later show, opposite Ed Sullivan, where Allen cut loose. There he dove into a vat of oatmeal, covered himself in dog food, and hosted cutting-edge characters, including Lenny Bruce, a young Frank Zappa, and Jack Kerouac.
After the shy Kerouac gave a disastrous reading at the Village Gate, Allen offered to accompany him. Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” blended seamlessly with Allen’s improv. Watch:
Allen’s antics continued throughout the 1960s. He rode a stunt plane through a billboard and played ping pong on a table hoisted 50 feet in the air. Teenagers Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and David Letterman were watching, learning.
“My comedy has always appealed to the hip and to the silly,” Allen said, “whether it’s the 9-year-olds who dig the silliness, or the high school and college kids who dig the hipness.” But the serious man outlasted the comic. A “philosophy fanatic,” Allen read widely and looked critically at TV. In 1971, he debuted a different talk show.
“Meeting of Minds” saw Allen hosting Theodore Roosevelt, Cleopatra, Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas Paine. “I see the literary and philosophical tradition of our culture not so much as a storehouse of facts and ideas,” he explained, “but rather as a hopefully endless Great Debate.” Four “meetings” aired on L.A.’s PBS station. When PBS judged the show “too thoughtful” for a wider audience, Allen paid for its network debut.
Running four seasons, “Meeting of Minds,” saw Allen host Socrates, Galileo, Karl Marx, Emily Dickinson. . . Allen, who researched and wrote the scripts, won an Emmy. The serious man had won the day.
Allen songs sprang from “the magic radio in my head.” “This Could Be the Start of Something,” was recorded by everyone from Count Basie to Aretha Franklin. “Gravy Waltz” won a Grammy. But in the 1980s, he began to write books — mysteries, short stories, and memoirs.
In 1991, frustrated by “goofola thinking,” Allen wrote Dumbth, defining “the lost art of thinking, with ways to make Americans smarter.” Reason, he argued, should be the fourth ‘R’ in schools. Allen also fought this good fight in the journal Skeptical Inquirer challenging Scientology and other pseudo-thought.
On into his 70s, Allen worked seven days a week. Diagnosed with colon cancer, he called his condition “critical — critical of nurses, critical of doctors, critical of the food, critical of the prices.'' When his condition became “stable,” he joked, “You know what the condition of the average stable is.''
In the fall of 2000, Allen had just finished Vulgarians at the Gate: Trash TV and Raunch Radio, when a car backed into him. "Typical of Steve,” wife Jayne Meadows said, “the dearest, sweetest man. . . When he got out of the car, he said to the man, ‘What some people will do to get my autograph.’”
But internal bleeding soon led to his death.
Allen once summed up his career: “I seem to have stumbled in at the right time in history, where a man who owns a combination of fairly mediocre abilities and wears a clean shirt can do well in a particular medium.” But “Steverino” will always have the last laugh. Watch: