Sunday, March 21, 1943
THE MILWAUKEE
JOURNAL – SCREEN and RADIO 11
The Great Gildersleeve’s Big Break
If Stage Hadn’t Been Too Wide, Hal
Peary
Mighty Not Have Jumped to Stardom
By J. D. Spiro
*Picture on page 1
THE HON. Throckmorton P.Gildersleeve, water commissioner of the widely known but mythical town of
Summerfield, is today a considerable sort of person in the life of this nation.
When at the appointed hour each Sunday (5:30 p. m. our time) he steps to the
microphone in NBC’s Hollywood studios some 28,000,000 individuals over the
country cock their ears toward their radio sets and eagerly wait to learn what
the Great Gildersleeve is about to do next.
Yet it was only yesterday, as time
goes, that the
Great Gildersleeve was but an unsung stooge for Fibber McGee and Molly. In truth, until one night in radio New Year’s week of 1939, the
Great Gildersleeve was just a lot of other fellows of diverse nationalities,
including the Chinese. Then on that night, at the Palace theater in Chicago,
suddenly and wholly unexpectedly he headed straight for radio, as well as
movie, stardom.
Had the stage at the Palace,
formerly the Orpheum of the good old vaudeville days, not been a few feet wider
than most events now a part of radio history would never have occurred, and the
world, unconscious of its loss, might never have heard of
Throckmorton P.Gildersleeve at all. This we have straight from Gildersleeve’s alter ego, the
dark, rotund, smiling Californian professionally known as Harold Peary.
Villain Laugh Makes Star of Stooge
As Peary tells the story, after
some years at NBC in San Francisco he was shifted in 1935 to that network’s
Chicago studios as a staff character actor, arriving there the week in which
Fibber McGee and Molly first went on the network. Within two years he became a
part of the
Fibber McGee and Mollly show , doing a wide variety of roles. At one
moment, for instance, he was a Chinese restaurant keeper, Gooey Fooey, at
another the panicky Portuguese piccolo player; at still another Mr. Bank Night,
the local movie exhibitor.
That sort of thing continued until
New Year’s week four years ago. In that week Fibber and Molly were booked for
personal appearances at the Palace and Peary went with them to do his accustoined
stooging. At the climax of this sales effort, McGee would snap his own
suspenders, his pants would start to come down and Peary would exit laughing.
“As I started off the stage that
first night,” Peary recalls, “I suddenly became aware that I had farther to go
than I had thought, for the stage was extra wide, and I realized I had to do
something to cover those last few feet of my exit. Now in my early days at NBC
in San Francisco, I’d played a burlesque villain, one of those hokum stock
characters of old-time melodrama with a curly black mustache, a leer and a
cornful, hollow, mocking laugh. As I moved toward the wings that laugh just
popped out of the forgotten past.”
It all happened too quickly for
Peary to know just how. But there was no uncertainty about the effect. The
Palace rocked with applause.
“It looks,” said Peary to himself
that moment, “as if we had something there.”
Those responsible for the
Fibber McGee and Molly show were no less discerning Don Quinn, the able script writer,
promptly went to work and by the following Tuesday he had sketched out a
pompous character with the Peary laugh modified just, but and had named him
Throckmorton P.Gildersleeve . Peary then dropped all his other
characterizations.
At first Gildersleeve was just a
foil for McGee, often outlandish, sometimes obnoxious. Gradually, however, he
became dramatically more honest and sympathetic and he soon had a growing fan
following. Meanwhile the Fibber and Molly company moved out to Hollywood. Thus,
definitely on the rise, Peary came back to the California he had left four year
before. By 1841 Gildersleeve had become so important as a radio figure that NBC
decided to offer him as a summer substitute for McGee and Molly. The latter’s
sponsor however, after auditioning him and Ransom Sherman, picked Sherman.
But news of Peary’s audition had
gotten around, and on Aug. 28, 1941, for another advertiser. Peary began the
series of little comedy-dramas that have now lifted him to eleventh place among
half hour air shows, with a Crossley survey rating of 25.7. He is said to be
the first radio actor thus to leap from stooge to stardom.
Stage, Silent Films Part of Past
A Portuguese American whose real
name is Harrold Jose Pereira De Faria, the creator of Gildersleeve was born 37
years ago on his father’s dairy farm at San Leandro, Calif., near the east side
of San Francisco bay. His mother early taught him to sing and by age 13 he was
a boy baritone in a juvenile troupe. He also had a talent for mimicry and soon
he interrupted his schooling at St. Mary’s convent near San Leandro to travel
the Orpheum circuit with Sylvia Breamer, whose name once meant something in
silent films. After quitting this to go to St. Mary’s college near his home, he
was again lured by the stage and joined Berton Churchill in “Alias the Deacon”
at a San Francisco theater.
Later young Harrold, now known as
Pearry, did a lot of Pacific coast trouping of one kind and another, during
which he even tried the silent film, first with Bobby Vernon, then in a small
way with De Mille in “King of Kings.”
All His Weight for ‘Gildy”
Meanwhile NBC had spread its first
radio network with Pacific coast headquarters in San Francisco, so Peary went
back there in 1928 and landed a job as a staff actor and singer at the handsome…ure
of $9 a show. His forte was dialect roles. At one time in the seven years he
spent at NBC in San Francisco he had parts in 17 different shows calling for
dialects, and he did seven or eight roles in one show.
When Peary returned to Hollywood
from Chicago in 1939 the movies again beckoned. He did a film with Bob Burns. “Comin’
Round the Mountain,” another “Country Fair.” But not until he put the
Great Gildersleeve on the screen did he begin to catch on substantially in pictures
began when RKO-Radio starred Fibber and Molly with Edgar Bergen in “Look Who’s
Laughing,” then in “Here We Go Again,” Gildersleeve had considerable roles in
each.
Now Peary is top man in a series
of photoplays the first of which, “
Great Gildersleeve ” RKO. Radio fiinshed
last fall, and the second of which, “Dildersleeve’s Bad Day,” is now before the
cameras. With a three year contract, calling for a minimum of two films a year.
Peary will do his third soon. It will be “Gildersleeve’s Ghost”
These little comedy-dramas seek to
put on film the essential character of the air show and they include most of
the radio figures though these in some cases, are not played by the same
actors. Thus in “Gildersleeve’s Bad Day, Birdie (Lillian Randolph) and Mr.
Peavey (Richard Le Grand) are uncharged, but three others are done by players
not associated with broadcasts.
Peary is not one of the many
actors who take all the credit for success to themselves. He spreads it around
handsomely and dwells on the merits of the two writers who turn out his weekly
broadcast John Whedon, formerly of the New Yorker magazine, and Sam Moore.
Their problem each week is to get Gildersleeve in and out of a dilemma in 30
minutes while … keeping him strictly in
character pompous and selfassured: with ambitions far outrunning his
abilities withal, friendly and likable.
Amiability is one of Peary’s own
outstanding traits. To all around the NBC studios and on the RKO-Radio lot he
is “Hal.” He usually appears with a cigar stuck between his teeth and a smile
for everyone though it as said he can get hopping mad at times and explode with
loud…
Of medium height, feet 9 inches,
with black hair and brown eye, he now runs heavily to avoirdupois. In the past
four year. He says, he has put on 50 pounds for a current total of 235.
“I did it all for Gildersleeve,”
he explains. “He should be a comfortably fat man especially on the screen.”
When Peary goes home at night it
is to a wife with whom he has lived for the past 14 years. She is the former
Betty Jourdaine , who was a dancer in the stage when Peary was trouping around
the wet in his twenties. They met while he was on tour in Arizona where she
went from San Francisco to join the company. Today they live on a little walnut
ranch in the San Fernando valley near Encino, a favorite spot of movie and
radio actors, of which Fibber McGee is mayor.
There Peary in his currently
infrequent spare moments relaxes with his phonograph records of which he has
many, or fusses around with a collection of old and rare firearms, or maybe
does a bit of writing. Once he used to frequent the police courts in Oakland
and San Francisco for material out of which he fashioned real life crime
stories for detective magazines.
This Star Doesn’t Neglect Mail.
For the last five years he has
been collecting information on book on which he is working which probably will
be the first to give full recognition to the achievements of Portuguese-Americans
in the field of American art and the theater.
“Most people in this country,”
says Peary, “think we Portuguese are just a lot of fishermen.”
With all his activities Peary does
not neglect his fan mail, which now has grown to sizable volume. He is
especially interested in letters from the boys in service and he derived no
little satisfaction from on he received not so long ago. It was from a soldier,
who wrote: “I get a bigger kick out of that laugh of yours than anything I
know. It always makes me laugh, too. It sure would be swell to be able to hear
it whenever I felt low.”
Today that soldier can turn on the
famous Gildersleeve laugh whenever he likes, for Peary made a special recording
of it and sent it to him overseas.
Gildersleeve’s neighbors and
relatives help him get a lot of those Sunday laughs. Meet (left) Mr. Peavey,
the druggist of “I wouldn’t say that” fame. Then there are Gildy’s nephew Leroy(played by Walter Tetley) and Niece Marjorie (Lurene Tuttle), while at the
right the great man himself (with mustache) squares off with his rival in love,
the hated Judge Hooker (Earle Ross)
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