Eddie Mayehoff

Eddie Mayehoff was an American actor and entertainer born Edward Mier Mayehoff on July 7, 1909, in Baltimore, Maryland. He grew up in Norwalk, Connecticut, and went on to graduate from Yale University's School of Music, where he sang in the glee club, led the school's orchestra, and played four instruments.

Mayehoff launched his professional life as a musician, taking up the trombone and fronting a dance band at New York hotels. For five years he toured hotels across the United States as part of the Knott and United Hotels chains before abandoning music in favor of celebrity impersonations performed in nightclubs. By 1940 he had secured a weekly slot on the Mutual Radio Network with a program called On the Town, and he went on to appear regularly on The Charlie McCarthy Show and to serve as host of Beat the Band. During World War II he enlisted in the Coast Guard, but seasickness led to his departure from that service; he subsequently entertained military personnel through the USO and worked with the Army's radio division, also recording programs for the BBC.

Mayehoff moved into television early in the medium's history, co-hosting Hour Glass from 1946 to 1947, which was the first regularly scheduled network variety program in the United States. In 1952 he starred in the NBC sitcom Doc Corkle, a series that ran for only three weeks. During the 1954–55 television season he appeared in That's My Boy, playing a construction contractor and former football player who pushes his son toward success in American football — a role he had originated in the 1951 Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis film of the same name. He also appeared alongside Martin and Lewis in two additional films, The Stooge in 1952 and Artists and Models in 1955. On screen, he is perhaps most widely remembered for playing Harold Lampson, a henpecked husband and inept lawyer, in the 1965 film How to Murder Your Wife. During the 1950s he was also visible in television commercials, including advertisements for Falstaff beer.

His Broadway career spanned from 1944 to 1963. He made his earliest credited appearances in Rhapsody in 1944 and Concert Varieties in 1945, followed by the comedy Season in the Sun in 1950. He received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 1957, the year he appeared in A Visit to a Small Planet. Subsequent Broadway work included the revue A Thurber Carnival in 1960 and A Rainy Day in Newark in 1963, among other productions.

Mayehoff died on November 12, 1992, in Ventura, California, at the age of 83.