Word: allen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Allen employs four assistant writers, but he does three-quarters of the show himself. He takes their drafts and rewrites them completely-between the lines. Groused one writer: "The only reason he hired us was because he likes to work on dirty paper." Gripes Allen: "Most writers just jump from cliché to cliché." He himself is so afraid of clichés that he even shies from saying "hello" to friends...
...Allens rarely gad about. One night a week they take in a movie. The other evenings, while Fred works, Portland reads or knits in bed-an old vaudeville custom. They rarely entertain. Allen's best friends are "just plain people"-barbers, shoeshine boys, paper boys, waiters, delicatessen storekeepers. With them, says Comic Henry Morgan, he is "a reluctantly amiable guy." From them, he collects an authentic U.S. idiom...
Myrrh Was Twit's. Allen comes honestly by the common touch. He was born John Florence Sullivan, 52 years ago, on the lace-curtain-Irish fringe of Cambridge, Mass. His father was a bookbinder. His mother died when he was three, and he and his brother Bobby went to live with her sister,"Aunt Lizzie" Herlihy, in Allston, Mass. He was a scrawny kid, all arms, legs and adenoids. The tough little Micks in his new neighborhood took one look at his pinched, birdlike face, nicknamed him "Twit," and let him play alone. To pass time - and attract attention...
...smash," Fred recalls. "They all told me I ought to be on the stage. The bastards. I believed them." At 17, he broke into Sam Cohen's Amateur Night circuit-50? a night. One night a noisy M.C. heckled him: "Where did you learn to juggle?" Allen tried his first onstage ad lib: "I took a correspondence course in baggage-smashing." Soon he got a chance to fill in for a professional juggler-at $2 a night. He took his first stage name: "Paul' Huckle-European Entertainer...
When the U.S. declared war, Fred came home, joined the Army, entertained in camps. After the war he took the name of an actors' agent, broke into the Keith circuit as Fred Allen, touring with the likes of Sophie Tucker, Eva Tanguay, Rooney & Bent. His act began on a dark stage with a spotlight on a placard, reading: "Mr. Allen Is Quite Deaf. If You Care to Applaud, Please Do So Loudly." His suit, he confided to the audience, had been made in Jersey City-"I'm a bigger man there than I am here...