Actors - Pert Kelton

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	Actors - Pert Kelton

Pert Kelton (1907-1968) was an American vaudeville, movie, and television actress.

Kelton was the original Alice Kramden on The Honeymooners skits on The Jackie Gleason Show (the basis for the sitcom The Honeymooners (1950-1952) featuring Jackie Gleason as her husband Ralph Kramden and Art Carney as their upstairs neighbor Ed Norton, and Elaine Stritch as the burslesque dancer wife of Norton (replaced fairly quickly by the more wholesome looking Joyce Randolph).

Kelton appeared in the original sketches, generally running about 15 or 20 minutes, shorter than the later one-season half-hour series and 1960s hour-long musical versions, but she was intensely believable on a level never seen in later permutations.

The early incarnation of The Honeymooners on the DuMont Television Network was much darker and harsher than the softened, toned-down CBS version that appeared after Kelton was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and was replaced by Audrey Meadows. Kelton's absence was explained away as "health problems".

In the early shows, Gleason's character was a young fat man married to a middle-aged battle-axe, instead of a vibrant young beauty, and the arguments and comedy were harrowingly realistic, almost like watching your neighbors through a keyhole.

Prior to The Honeymooners, Kelton had worked as a beautiful young comedienne in A-list movies during the '30s, with a particularly memorable turn in 1933 as a gorgeous dance hall singer called "Trixie" in Raoul Walsh's The Bowery
with Wallace Beery, George Raft, Jackie Cooper, and Fay Wray.

Perhaps Kelton's finest role was also in 1933, as the wise-cracking young "Minnie" in Gregory LaCava's amazing pre-Code comedy Bed of Roses (1933 film)
, in which she played a bawdy prostitute (along with Constance Bennett) fond of getting admiring men helplessly drunk before robbing them, at least until getting caught and tossed back into jail.

Kelton has all the best lines, surprisingly wicked and amusing observations that would never be allowed in an American film after the adoption of the Hollywood Production Code. The film remains extremely realistic in terms of the interactions of the characters and features an early turn by Joel McCrea as the leading man, the skipper of a small boat who pulls Bennett's character out of the river after she's dived off a ship to escape capture.

Ironically, given her later blacklisting, Kelton's last movie for years, released in 1939, was called Whispering Enemies. Her next screen appearance was on television, in The Honeymooners and other sketches on the Gleason show, where she did not last long because of the blacklist.

Kelton gained a measure of professional redemption in the late 1950s playing the impatient mother of skittish librarian Marian Paroo, who was portrayed by (Barbara Cook) in the original Broadway cast of the Meredith Willson play The Music Man
, and in the movie version (in which Kelton also appeared) by Shirley Jones, which is almost certainly what most people, if they remember her at all, remember her for, with Irish brogue and whimsy, although she did look a little old to be playing Ron Howard's mother also, by that time.

In the 1960s, she was brought back to the The Honeymooners cast to occasionally play Alice's mother-in-law in the hour-long musical version of The Honeymooners, with Sheila MacRae as a fetching young Alice.

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