Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [39]
Fran Allison, The Breakfast Club’s “Aunt Fanny,” is another down-to-earth Chicagoan with a delightful sense of humor. It is no exaggeration to say that none of her quips and barbs is prepared – they are all completely adlib. That’s how she got her first break. One day at WMT in Waterloo, Iowa, when an emcee suddenly ran out of material, he grabbed Fran, who was on the staff of the station, pulled her in front of the microphone, and shouted, “Well, here comes Aunt Fanny! Come on in and say something, Fanny.” Fran had to go on cold. As sharp then as she is now, she created her lovable character on the spot. “Aunt Fanny” has been convulsing radio listeners ever since. Fran first met Chicagoan Burr Tillstrom during World War II when they appeared together at bond rallies. Burr is as adroit at improvisation as Fran – all their Kukla, Fran and Ollie shows were done without a script. And for years this girl who has won fame for working without prepared material was also one of the best readers of lines in the business – as a Chicago soap-opera actress. Off-mike, Fran is the wife of Archie Levington, a successful music publisher.
Speaking of soapers, Chicago is the home town of the queen of the serial writers, Irna Phillips. In 1930 she became one of the founders of soap opera with Painted Dreams on WGN. Since then, she has aired as many as five shows a day as the creator of such sudsy classics as The Guiding Light, Road of Life, Today’s Children, Right to Happiness, Lonely Women, and Woman in White. And for all the domestic tribulations she has dramatized, Miss Phillips herself has never married!
Thanks to such talent as Clifton Utley, Paul Harvey, John Harrington, Len O’Connor, Fahey Flynn, and Alex Dreier, Chicago’s radio newsrooms are among the most active and respected anywhere. Pound for pound, there is probably not a newshawk anywhere who compares with Dreier. A native of Hawaii, ample Alex has a record as one of broadcasting’s most accurate prophets. In one World War II broadcast he predicted the Allied invasion of North Africa – almost to the hour. He missed the date of Germany’s surrender by just four days. He called the turn on the rout of Rommel and the war in Russia. In 1948, when most pollsters predicted Thomas E. Dewey’s election as President, Alex rightly named Harry S. Truman. And in 1952 he came within two electoral votes of pegging General Eisenhower’s landslide. A “Man on the Go” in fact as well as nickname, Alex is one of Chicago’s most popular banquet speakers. (His secret: “I never speak longer than the weakest kidney.”)
Other home towners – Mike Wallace, Lowell Thomas, Durward Kirby, and Betsy Palmer (if I may claim East Chicago, Indiana, too) have had distinguished network careers. But of all the prominent Chicagoans in broadcasting, none has acquitted himself with more distinction than Hugh Downs, whose difficult task it was to serve as the balance wheel in a delicate mechanism that was The Jack Paar Show. I have known Jack Paar for years. When his show succeeded the old NBC-TV America After Dark program (on which I had been one of the participants), I was host at his first press reception in Chicago. After his much-publicized walkout over censorship of the “water closet story,” I was one of the two newspaper columnists that Paar wanted to “grill” him on the air (Hy Gardner, of the New York Herald Tribune, was the other). A number of Paar fans protested that Hy and I “grilled” Paar too vigorously, but that had been our assignment and Jack had thanked us for it personally. My files, in fact, contain many letters and quotes of endearment and respect from Paar. The outburst against me that he finally made in the aftermath of his “expedition” to West Berlin came as a surprise, and Hugh Downs’ response to it, to my mind, shows best what a thorough gentleman Hugh is. Downs, as you’ll recall, stood up to his boss and criticized him openly for making a personal attack on me. Poor