by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I watched a March 21, 1954
episode of the Jack Benny Program called
“Goldie, Fields and Glide,” a marvelous little gem of entertainment in which
Benny’s guest stars were Bing Crosby and his lifetime friend George Burns.
Benny and Burns did woefully little together (the only other collaboration I’ve
seen of theirs is the Paramount film The Big Broadcast of 1937, a bit of a letdown) but they’re marvelous here. The
gimmick is that Benny wants Bing Crosby as a guest on his TV show but worries
that Bing will want too much money, so he’s invited both Bing and Burns to play
golf with him — only they never get near the golf course. Benny has set up his
valet, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson — who, because of Benny’s penchant for
letting his sidekicks score off him, was virtually the only African-American
comedian of the age who got to play street-wise instead of stupid — with a
preposterous Keaton-esque contraption with which Rochester can rack Benny’s
hammock, fan him, churn butter and make ice cream (Benny has decided to sell
the last two items by sneaking his phone number onto Carnation trucks — at the
time Carnation was George Burns’ sponsor and Lucky Strike cigarettes was
Benny’s) all at the same time, though he runs out of limbs when Benny bids him
answer his phone as well. Rochester is doing all this while reading a mystery
novel called Murder in the Attic,
and he gets so excited about the book that he starts pushing the treadmill of
Benny’s hammock-rocker too fast, with the result that Benny goes flying off the
contraption and into a tree. (The next thing that happens is Rochester answers
Benny’s phone with, “The residence of Jack Benny, star of stage, screen, radio,
TV and trying to be Tarzan.”)
Then there’s a marvelous send-up of vaudeville in
which Benny recalls his days as “Glide” in the act “Goldie, Fields and Glide” —
Goldie being Bing Crosby and Fields being George Burns. Their act, as Benny
remembers it, consists of the three of them doing a soft-shoe dance to a
typical song of the vaudeville era and a grim spoof of the song “Put Them All
Together, They Spell Mother,” which Crosby sings more or less “straight” and
Benny ridicules with a talking bridge that savages the cheap sentimentality of
the song. When Crosby comes by he, Burns and Benny reminisce — Benny says to
Crosby, “You didn’t become big until Paul Whiteman put you in front of the
Coconut Grove,” and Crosby says to Burns, “And you didn’t become big until you put Gracie Allen in
front of a justice of the peace.” Burns turns to the audience and says, “I’ve
got a great comeback for that, but I’m saving it for my own show.” Later,
Crosby insists on resting in the hammock — it’s a wonder he doesn’t ask
Rochester for a pitcher of Minute Maid orange juice (Crosby co-owned the
company) — and he agrees to do Benny’s show for a fee of $10,000. Benny
responds by pushing the treadmill and rocking the hammock faster and faster, until
Crosby flies off it into the tree — and Benny tells him, “I’m not letting you
down until you lower your price.” Crosby refuses, and then the camera pans over
to another tree where, lo and behold, Bob Hope is nestled. “You’d better do as
he asks,” Hope tells Crosby. “I’ve been up here for four months now.” What’s
amazing about this show is how matter-of-fact it was, how much a product of an
era in which entertainment this good was considered routine — “Oh, just another
Jack Benny show with Bing Crosby, George Burns and Bob Hope” — whereas today we
watch with goop-eyed amazement that there were ever people this funny not only regularly featured on TV
but beloved as superstars. It’s also jarring, to say the least, to see
cigarettes advertised on TV (our source for the show was a commercial DVD that
presented both this and the Liberace episode unedited and with the original
commercials in place) — especially when a Mexican gardener with the obligatory
Frito Bandido accent comes on and delivers the Lucky Strike pitch, albeit
ostensibly talking about bananas; the show is obviously both using the strategy
of embedding the commercials into the program and making fun of it!
