Word: gleasons
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With the show-biz-sporting crowd that collects there. Gleason stands around at the bar, communicating in the limited vocabulary of the milieu: "Pal," "Bum," "Tomato." and "Har-de-har-har." Jackie compares Shor's to "the corner candy store when you were a kid, except instead of Jujubes you've got the booze." The famous story is true that Gleason and the 240-lb. Shor once raced each other around the block, running in opposite directions. Gleason was standing coolly at the bar when Shor puffed in. Gleason had used a cab. but Shor, whose giant brain...
Shor got his revenge one night when he introduced Gleason to "Mr. Joe Shu-man," explaining that Shuman was a dress manufacturer from Philadelphia and an old Shor pal. Shuman confided that in his spare time he sometimes liked to shoot a little pool. Gleason prides himself on shooting an excellent stick in his own right, and always has (at the age of 13, he became the pool champion of his neighborhood in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, upholding the honor and petty bets of the Irish kids against the Italian champion "from up the hill"). He invited Shuman...
Absolutely Nothing. Jackie Gleason was born in Brooklyn in the winter of 1916. His father was an auditor for the Mutual Life Insurance Co. who sold candy bars to his fellow employees to supplement the family income. His only brother died before Jackie was three, and Jackie was in effect an only child. When Jackie was eight, his father went to work one day and never came home. His disappearance has never been explained. "He was," says Jackie with a quiet smile, "as good a father as I've ever known...
Thomas Patrick Robinson, Ph.D., a sometime college professor who grew up with Jackie (and was later-as Bookshelf Robinson-given frequent mention on Gleason's TV shows, along with such other neighborhood immortals as Duddy Duddelson, Crazy Guggenham, and Fatso Fogarty), remembers Jackie as "a big hero in the neighborhood-because of the pool, and also because he was so funny. He had a slouchy mannerism, a duck-waddling walk." Gleason's mother worked in a subway change booth and had small regard for her son's comic talents, and when Jackie brought down the house with...
...take Hollywood by storm." Gleason told his friends, but Warner Bros, today does not even remember that he was there. He was miscast (gangster, blue-eyed Arab) in a few pictures and spent most of his time performing at Slapsie Maxie's nightclub. Gleason would drink iced-tea tumblers full of whisky ("No booze, no laughs" was his motto) before going onstage to sing and dance and do improvisations, low comedy, and devastating imitations of more celebrated performers. Retreating to New York, and turned down for service in World War II on physical grounds, Gleason spent several professionally lean...