Actors - Fred Allen

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	Actors - Fred Allen

Fred Allen (born John Florence Sullivan on May 31, 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American comedian whose absurdist, pointed radio show (1934 - 1949) made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humourists in the so-called classic era of American radio.

His best-remembered gag may be his long-running mock "feud" with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but Allen didn't need it to make or secure his own reputation. He was one of the most accomplished, daring humourists of his (and most any) time. The unchallenged master ad-libber, he battled censorship and created routines whose style and substance alike influenced several future comic generations. Perhaps more than any of his generation, Fred Allen wielded an influence that outlived both his contemporaries and the medium that made him famous.

Growing Up

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Irish Catholic parents, Allen barely knew his mother, Cecilia Herlihy Sullivan, who died of pneumonia when he was short of three years old.

His father, James Henry Sullivan, and his infant brother, Robert, were taken in by one of his mother's sisters, "my Aunt Lizzie", around whom he hooked the first chapter of his second memoir, Much Ado About Me. The father was so shattered by the mother's death that, according to his famous son, he drank more heavily and engaged his witty storytelling less at home for a long enough time.

Aunt Lizzie, too, suffered: her husband, Michael, was partially paralysed by lead poisoning shortly after they married, leaving him mostly unable to work, something Allen remembered causing contention among her sisters who believed he had ruined her life, an opinion she didn't share. Eventually, Allen's father remarried and offered his sons the choice between coming with him and his new wife or staying with Aunt Lizzie. Allen's younger brother chose to go with their father, but Allen decided to "stay with my Aunt Lizzie. I never regretted it."

The Vaudevillian

Allen received piano lessons as a boy, his father having brought an Emerson upright along when they moved in with his aunt. He learned exactly two songs, "Hiawatha" and "Pitter, Patter, Little Raindrops," and would be asked to play "half or all my repertoire" when visitors came to the house. He also worked at the Boston Public Library, where he discovered a book about the origin and development of comedy, endured other upheavals at home (various other aunts came and went living with Aunt Lizzie and prompted several moves), and took up juggling as well as learning more about comedy.

Finally, some library workers planned a show and asked him to mix between juggling and some of his comedy. When a girl in the crowd told him, "You're crazy to keep working here at the library. You ought to go on stage," Allen's career path was set.

Allen took a later job with a local piano company, added to his library work, and appeared at a number of amateur night competitions, soon taking the stage name Fred St. James and booking with the local vaudeville circuit at $30 a week, enough at that time to allow him to quit his jobs with the library and the piano company. Often billing himself as the world's worst juggler, Allen refined and advanced the mix of his clumsy juggling and the comic routines. He toured the world in a decade worth of vaudeville work during which a billing mixup provided the stage name change that stayed with him the rest of his life. Booked with a performer named Edgar Allen, he found the venue's front office scrambled the names, advertising Edgar James and Fred Allen.

Between Vaudeville and Broadway

Allen gave vaudeville itself a timeline of 1875-1925, but he actually left vaudeville a few years earlier, moving to work in such Schubert Brothers stage productions as The Passing Show in 1922. The show played well in its runup to Broadway but lasted only ten weeks at the Winter Garden Theater. Allen did, however, take something far more lasting from the show: one of the show's chorus girls, Portland Hoffa, who became his wife.

He also took good notices for his comic work in several of the productions, particularly Vogues and Greenwich Village Follies, and continued to develop his comic writing, even writing a column for Variety called "Near Fun." A salary dispute ended the column: Allen wanted only $60 a week to give up his theater work to become a full-time columnist, but his editor tried a sleight-of-hand based on the paper's ad rates to deny him. He spent his summer in Boston, honed his comic and writing skills even further, worked in a respectfully received duo that billed themselves as Fink and Smith, and played a few of the dying vaudeville houses.

He returned to New York to the pleasant surprise that Portland Hoffa was taking instruction to convert to Roman Catholicism. After the couple married, Allen began writing material for them to use together ("With a vaudeville act, Portland and I could be together, even if we couldn't find any work"), and the couple divided their time between the show business circuit and Allen's New England family home in summers.

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Actors - Fred Allen

Growing Up

The Vaudevillian

Between Vaudeville and Broadway

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