Inventing Late Night
Steve Allen and the Original Tonight Show
by Ben Alba
Prometheus, 368 pp., $26
INCREDIBLE AS IT SEEMS, there was a time when Americans went to sleep at 11 p.m. That was before 1954, the epochal year in which the H-bomb was tested on Bikini atoll; Chiang Kai-shek was elected president of the Republic of China; Joe Welch asked Senator Joe McCarthy if he had no sense of decency; the Geneva Conference partitioned Vietnam into two countries, North and South; the workplace made way for millions of women; Elvis Presley cut his first record; the final episode of The Lone Ranger was broadcast on radio; and The Tonight Show, starring Steve Allen, debuted on television.
Nothing was the same after that. The news was watched more intently, dinners were served later because people got home later and the evening stretched on as never before. With angst at an all-time high, the public appetite for diversion increased exponentially. Sensing an opportunity to run commercials where once there were only test patterns, NBC programmers tried something new--a kind of late-night free-for-all, run by a bespectacled thirtysomething emcee with an ability to improvise with ease at the piano and the mike.
Looking back, Allen observed, "I seem to have stumbled in at the right time in history, where a man who owns a combination of fairly mediocre abilities and wears a clean shirt can do well in a particular medium. A hundred years ago, I'd probably have been an unsuccessful writer."
This modesty was both legitimate and false. He might well have failed in the creative arts a century before. But his abilities were far from commonplace, and he knew it. As Ben Alba indicates in this lively hagiography, Allen drove himself hard, and never settled for the safe mediocrity of network programming. The child of vaudevillians, Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen was intellectually curious from childhood onward, read omnivorously, worked his way through college, wangled himself a job on radio, graduated to local TV, and then, when his ratings hit the sky, went national.
From the start, he brought an enlightened, low-key style to a medium that had been hysterical in tempo and brainless in content. The critic Leonard Feather rightly observed that Allen was "the greatest friend jazz had on television" because he featured so many prominent musicians on his program, from Chet Baker and Marian McPartland to Buddy Rich and Thelonious Monk. But Allen also paid attention to the classical side, and featured, among others, Van Cliburn and Leonard Bernstein, seeding his monologues with references to opera and literature.
At the same time, he made certain not to highbrow himself out of a job. Comedy became an essential part of his persona. One of the most imitated portions of the Tonight Show was "The Question Man," during which Allen supplied the deadpan query to various answers:
Announcer: Butterfield 8--3000. Allen: How many hamburgers did Butterfield eat? Announcer: A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou. Allen: What's on a cannibal's menu?
Whenever he felt that he was getting too verbal, Allen explored the possibilities of the videocam in a series of "crazy shots." Alba describes a series of interludes. In one, Don Knotts "is seated at a diner counter and drops his spoon into the bowl. He reaches deep into the bowl--past his elbow--before he finally reaches and retrieves his spoon." In another, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were cast as Siamese twins joined at the shoulder. When one sipped water from a glass, the other spit it out like a fountain. In a third, an Egyptian mummy's tomb, resting vertically, was opened to reveal singer Steve Lawrence making a call from a pay telephone.
These visuals were also sedulously aped at the time; they still are, by David Letterman, Jay Leno, and almost every talk show host in the country. Eventually, Groucho Marx dubbed Steve "the funniest Allen since Fred," and most of America agreed with him. They came to know Allen and his lineup of fine second bananas--Knotts, Louis Nye, Tom Poston, Bill Dana, et al. --as family members. They put Allen's song "This Could Be the Start of Something Big" on the hit parade, and welcomed new words, concepts, and faces (Albert Brooks, Steve Martin) when the host introduced them.
All very well, said the NBC brass, but a renaissance man was not what nighttime needed. Allen was only allowed to stretch so far. His ambitious plans for something he called "Meeting of the Minds," for example, were immediately nixed as too taxing for the average insomniac. Their star employee had proposed a series of shows that would summon up the spirits of prominent figures. Freud, Hegel, Montaigne, Aristotle, and Clarence Darrow would debate the value of capital punishment. Othello, Hamlet, Romeo, and Juliet would discuss the meaning of their speeches with the Bard himself. As usual, Allen was ahead of his time; in 1977, almost 20 years later, PBS broadcast six hour-long "Meeting of the Minds" specials.
In one memorable episode, St. Thomas Aquinas expressed his belief that women were inferior ("Woman should look on man as her natural master"). This did not sit well with Cleopatra (amusingly played by Allen's wife, actress Jayne Meadows). In another, Darwin reproached Attila for his military ruthlessness. Replied the Hun, "I wasn't aware, Dr. Darwin, that the British Empire was built by pacifists." An Emmy and a Peabody award followed.
A decade later, Allen was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame for his lifetime contributions to the medium. These were but a few of the prizes he won in a long professional lifetime. But as Alba points out, the most significant was an unofficial tribute--a bit of dialogue that occurred on The Simpsons. Krusty the Clown is replaced by a vulgarian puppet, Gabbo. As Bart and Lisa Simpson watch the television, Gabbo chortles, "And now it's time for another Gabbo crank call!"
Bart: Oh, I can't believe it. He stole this bit from Krusty! Lisa: Well, Krusty stole it from Steve Allen.
Krusty was not alone. Allen died on October 30, 2000, full of honors and tributes, but the pilfering has never stopped. If you would seek his monument, surf around.
Stefan Kanfer is the author of Groucho and Ball of Fire. His next book, Stardust Lost, a history of the Yiddish theater, will be published next year.