by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles a curious TV
item he’d downloaded from archive.org: the season two premiere of The Morey
Amsterdam Show, aired April 21, 1949 on
the short-lived and really quirky DuMont network. Morey Amsterdam was the
pint-sized Jewish comedian best known for his supporting role as Buddy Sorrell,
one of Rob Petrie’s (Dick Van Dyke) compadres in the writing room of the fictitious “Allan Brady
Show” on the real Dick Van Dyke Show in the early 1960’s (a series created by Carl Reiner based on his
memories of working in the writing room of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows alongside Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart
and Neil Simon!). Before that he was a nightclub MC and he got to do this show,
first on the CBS radio network, then for the first year on CBS-TV and for its
second and third years on DuMont, playing a nightclub MC with two sidekicks who later went on to much more
important careers: Art Carney as Newton the Waiter (the character had been
called “Charlie” on the CBS version, also played by Carney, and several times
during this show Amsterdam slips up and calls Carney “Charlie” instead of
“Newton”) and future author Jacqueline Susann as a cigarette girl with a
surprisingly good deadpan sense of humor. (The show was produced by Susann’s
husband, Irving Mansfield, who promoted her so energetically — first as a
performer and then as a writer — that the hype itself became the subject of a
film, She’s So Fabulous!, with
Bette Midler playing Susann.) It’s the sort of show that’s funny but nowhere
near as funny as the writers thought it was (Amsterdam gets the writing credit
himself — though it’s highly likely he had help — and David B. Lewis managed
traffic, oops, I mean directed). Amsterdam is funny, all right, but he’s
clearly sucking off the bones of better, funnier Jewish comedians, including
Groucho Marx in his opening monologue (Charles was startled that the
conventions of TV variety shows, including the comedian/host’s opening
monologue, were already in place as early as 1949) and Jack Benny in his schtick of playing an instrument terribly. Benny became
famous for, among other things, his deliberately rotten violin playing (that he
could genuinely handle the
instrument became obvious on one of his shows in which he’s shown
finger-picking notes on the fretboard, and we have Joe Venuti’s testimony that
Benny was an excellent jazz violinist who could give Venuti a run for his money
in jam sessions), so Amsterdam decided to go him one better — or at least two
sizes bigger — and deliberately badly play a cello. (He, too, is shown finger-picking on the
fretboard and thereby giving away that he could really handle the instrument.)
The musical content of the show is supplied by a band led by jazz pianist
Johnny Guarnieri (who had played with Artie Shaw’s band and, as a member of the
Gramercy 5 — the band-within-a-band Shaw formed to compete with the Benny
Goodman Trio and Quartet — he became the first musician to record a jazz solo
on harpsichord), who as he has to back Amsterdam in a not-especially-funny
novelty song called “Yuk-a-Puk” has a bored look on his face that certainly
makes me think he was saying to himself, “Gee, I wish I was back playing with
Artie Shaw instead of having to do this shit.” (Yuk-a-Puk” went nowhere but
other songs with equally silly nonsense lyrics, like “Mairzy Doats” and “The
Hut-Sut Song,” were hits in the late 1940’s, in those dog years for music
between the end of the big bands and the rise of rock ’n’ roll.) Also we get a
vocal from Vic Damone on Cole Porter’s song “So in Love” from Kiss Me, Kate — Damone, here as in his later appearances on TV
and film, shows off a really nice crooner’s voice but is utterly clueless about
phrasing; opportunities to use rubato and syncopation a singer like Frank
Sinatra would have grabbed in a song like this go sailing by the oblivious
Damone. (I recall my late roommate/client John hearing me play Mel Tormé’s
version of the song “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas” and informing me that
it was Vic Damone who’d had the hit on that song originally; it was utterly
impossible for me to imagine Damone singing that song as well as Tormé, who was
a master of phrasing.) The show was
appealing in a certain dorky way — the scene with Susann was genuinely
hilarious (she plays a woman who’s taken to a baseball game and is clueless
about what’s going on; she can’t understand why all those people are torturing
that poor defenseless ball, including hitting it with a stick and throwing it
around the field) and Amsterdam proved a worthy straight-man for her, but in
the rest of it he’s pretty overwhelming and it’s easy to see how he worked
better as a sideman on The Dick Van Dyke Show than as a lead performer.
The show also featured
commercials for DuMont’s own line of TV sets — ironic since you had to own a DuMont set to be able to watch this show
at all! The company had been founded by experimental TV researcher Allan B.
DuMont, who had decided that the future of TV broadcasting lay in the
ultra-high-frequency, or UHF, band (channels 14 to 83, for those of you who
weren’t around in the days before cable when the number of available channels
was strictly limited to what could be broadcast over the air) rather than the
very-high-frequency or VHF, band (channels 2 to 13) the major broadcasting
players, RCA (parent company of NBC) and CBS, were using. So DuMont made sets
that could only tune in to UHF channels —
which meant you could only watch DuMont shows if you had a DuMont set and you
couldn’t watch NBC, CBS or ABC shows if you only had a DuMont set. Not
surprisingly, DuMont’s TV enterprise went out of business in 1955 and the sets
became very expensive pieces of useless furniture — at least until the FCC
started granting more UHF broadcasting licenses in the early 1960’s and in the
late 1960’s mandated that TV manufacturers had to start making sets that could
receive both VHF and UHF bands with
equal quality. The fact that so few DuMont programs survive (apparently there
was a warehouse full of them until the early 1970’s, when it was emptied and
most of the surviving kinescopes were dumped into the sea) has just added to
the quirky allure of the network and its legend — though DuMont deserves credit
for being the only company to film Charlie Parker performing live (with Dizzy
Gillespie and a pickup band on Tadd Dameron’s “Hot House” for a 1952 awards
show hosted by Earl Wilson, who’s also seen in a cameo here), a clip whose
rediscovery and first public showing in San Francisco in 1976 was a galvanic
event for jazz fans. (Later two other clips of Parker performing “Celebrity” and
“Ballade” were discovered, but they were post-synched to Parker’s records
rather than him performing in real time.)
