Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [37]
Once, Frankie Laine bet Allen $1,000 he couldn’t compose 50 songs a day for a week. Steve moved a piano into a music-store window in Hollywood and went to work. He not only won the bet but one number, “Let’s Go to Church Next Sunday,” as recorded by Perry Como and Margaret Whiting, became a record hit, and sold 300,000 sheet-music copies!
Last winter Chicago TV station WBKB (ABC) chose Allen as the first subject for a series called Back Home, created by producer Dan Schuffman and his staff. In this program, Steve visited his former neighborhood in Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side and reminisced about the days when, as a boy, he had spent hours thinking and composing poetry in Jackson Park near the Museum of Science and Industry, and how his unhappy childhood was manifest in such actions as his repeatedly playing hooky from school, and running away from the relatives with whom he lived during his mother’s long absences. It was a touching narrative which did much to explain the serious, introspective side of this highly talented entertainer.
And there is Julius (“Groucho”) Marx and his brothers. They called Chicago their home early in their careers. Recalls Groucho, “We lived in a slum area for many years. It wasn’t a slum until we moved in. We . . . that includes my mother and father, grandfather, my four brothers, aunt and uncle, and their child – a total of eleven living in a house with one bath. It was the busiest bathroom in town.”
A classic story concerns the Greenebaum banking firm, which held the mortgage on the Marx’ house. The payments always worried their mother. In the early days of their act, she would stand in the wings and as soon as the wacky brothers strayed from the script (it was inevitable), she would shout: “Greenebaum!” The word snapped everyone back to reality.
Several years ago, when the Greenebaum firm observed its centennial, Groucho wired: “It amazes me that you stayed in business a hundred years loaning money to people like us.” But the bank thinks highly of Groucho. Not only did it never foreclose, it even elected him an honorary board member!
Internationally, however, there is no better known or more beloved comedian than the one who has been the hero of hundreds of such scenes as this:
The time: Christmas. The place: Korea. “Well, here we are in Korea, the Miami Beach of the Far East,” the performer begins. “I won’t say it’s cold, but when we landed, Betty Furness opened the door of the plane. . . . You know, my grandfather was in the Navy. He was known as Admiral Tuna, the chicken of the sea.” Peals of laughter thunder out over Bayonet Bowl, near the 38th parallel that separates South Korea from its hostile neighbor to the North. Men and women in uniform forget the subzero weather, forget that they are eight thousand miles from home and its comforts, forget the blues that envelop a person separated from his loved ones at Christmas. Bob Hope is making it a merry holiday.
It is an everlasting source of pride to us that Chicago gave Hope his start. Born Lester Townes Hope in England, he moved with his family to Cleveland as a youngster. He had a brief career as a boxer, and then came to Chicago in 1928 with dreams of breaking into vaudeville. With the help of a Cleveland school chum, Charles Cooley, he met Charley Hogan, then a prominent vaudeville booker and now one of Chicago’s leading talent agents. His first professional assignment was as a Sunday night emcee at the old West Englewood Theater (now the Ogden) – for which he was paid fifteen dollars. Next