Jackie Gleason

Jackie Gleason, born Herbert Walton Gleason Jr. on February 26, 1916, in the Stuyvesant Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, was an American comedian, actor, writer, and composer who built one of the most wide-ranging careers in twentieth-century entertainment. He was later baptized as John Herbert Gleason and grew up at 328 Chauncey Street, an address he would later assign to the fictional Kramden household on The Honeymooners. His parents were Herbert Walton Gleason, born in New York City to an Irish father and an American mother, and Mae Agnes Kelly, an Irish immigrant from Farranree, County Cork. Gleason had one older brother, Clement, who died from meningitis at age fourteen in 1919. On December 15, 1925, his father collected his hat, coat, and paycheck and permanently abandoned the family, after which his mother took work as a subway attendant for the Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation.

Following his father's departure, Gleason began associating with a local gang and hustling pool. He attended P.S. 73 Elementary School in Brooklyn, John Adams High School in Queens, and Bushwick High School in Brooklyn, but left before graduating after a class play sparked his interest in performing. His earliest professional work included a position as master of ceremonies at a local theater paying four dollars per night, as well as stints as a pool hall worker, stunt driver, and carnival barker. He and a friend performed on amateur night at the Halsey Theater, where Gleason eventually replaced his friend Sammy Birch as master of ceremonies, and he also performed the same duties twice weekly at the Folly Theater.

Gleason was nineteen when his mother died in 1935 from complications of sepsis. Left with thirty-six cents and no place to live, he declined an offer from the family of his first girlfriend and instead moved into the city, sharing a hotel room with Birch and another comedian. Birch secured him a week-long engagement in Reading, Pennsylvania, paying nineteen dollars, which became his first job as a professional comedian. He subsequently found steady work in small clubs before advancing to larger Manhattan venues, including Leon and Eddie's and Jack White's Club 18, where insulting patrons was a central feature of the entertainment.

By his mid-twenties, Gleason had attracted the attention of film director Lloyd Bacon during a Club 18 appearance, which led to a contract with Warner Bros. at two hundred fifty dollars per week. He appeared under the name Jackie C. Gleason, the middle initial honoring his late brother Clement. His Warner Bros. credits included Navy Blues (1941) with Ann Sheridan and Martha Raye, the Humphrey Bogart feature All Through the Night (1942), and Orchestra Wives (1942), in which he played Glenn Miller's bass player. He also had a modest role in the Betty Grable–Harry James musical Springtime in the Rockies (1942). Warner Bros. loaned him to Columbia Pictures for the Army comedy Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1942), pairing him with comedian Jack Durant. The studio did not renew his contract after exhausting its plans for him. At the end of 1942, Gleason and Lew Parker led the cast of the roadshow production of Olsen and Johnson's New 1943 Hellzapoppin. During the war years, Gleason was classified 4-F and rejected for military service after Army doctors found that a broken left arm had healed incorrectly, that he had a pilonidal cyst, and that he was one hundred pounds overweight.

Gleason's Broadway career spanned from 1940 to 1978 and included appearances in Along Fifth Avenue, the 1943 musical Artists and Models, and the musical Follow the Girls. His most celebrated stage role came in the musical Take Me Along, for which he received the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical in 1960. He also appeared on Broadway in the play Sly Fox.

On television, Gleason developed The Jackie Gleason Show, which maintained high ratings from the mid-1950s through 1970. The series originated in New York City before production relocated to Miami Beach, Florida, in 1964, when Gleason established permanent residence there. His most enduring television creation was the character of city bus driver Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners, a role that drew directly on the brash visual and verbal comedy he had developed growing up in Brooklyn. The address he assigned to the Kramdens, 328 Chauncey Street, was his own childhood home.

His film career produced two particularly notable performances: Minnesota Fats in The Hustler (1961), opposite Paul Newman, and Sheriff Buford T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit trilogy, which ran from 1977 to 1983 and co-starred Burt Reynolds. Over the course of his career, Gleason received nominations for an Academy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and five Primetime Emmy Awards.

Parallel to his work in performance, Gleason maintained a prominent music career throughout the 1950s and 1960s, producing a series of bestselling mood music albums. His debut album, Music for Lovers Only, holds the record for the longest stay on the Billboard Top Ten Charts at 153 weeks, and his first ten albums each sold over one million copies. His recorded output encompasses more than twenty singles, nearly sixty long-playing record albums, and more than forty compact discs. Jackie Gleason died on June 24, 1987.