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Renaissance entertainer Allen dies at 78
By Compiled from Times wires © St. Petersburg Times, published November 1, 2000
Allen, 78, apparently died of a heart attack. He had been dining Monday night at the Encino home of his son, Bill Allen, who said: "He was a little tired after dinner. He went to relax, peacefully, and never reawakened." His wife, the actor Jayne Meadows, rushed to the nearby home, distraught. He looked like a comic version of Clark Kent -- tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed -- with horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like a half-nerd, half-hipster. But he was hip before most of America knew what the word meant. His show, the brainchild of network executive Pat Weaver, was home to comedians like Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Jonathan Winters. Although the show was similar in format to today's late-night programs, there was a serious side that has eroded over the years. Jazz performers appeared, and sometimes he would devote an entire show to topics like civil rights or drug use. Amid the formality of early TV, Tonight was a breath of fresh air. The show began with Allen noodling at the piano, playing some of his compositions and commenting wittily on events of the day. "It was tremendous fun to sit there night after night reading questions from the audience and trying to think up funny answers to them; reading angry letters to the editor; introducing the greats of comedy, jazz, Broadway and Hollywood; welcoming new comedians like Shelley Berman, Jonathan Winters, Mort Sahl and Don Adams," he once said. Still, despite this, and despite writing 4,000 to 9,000 songs (This Could Be the Start of Something Big the most notable) and 40 books, and starring in The Benny Goodman Story, Allen is remembered most for his comedy, accompanied by a high-pitched giggle. Allen believed that everyone had a "silly center" and that no one should try to suppress it. Of all the late-night hosts who came after him, Allen was most similar to Letterman. He had a mischievous streak that would lead him to calling people randomly out of a phone book and striking up conversations with them, sometimes asking them how their fern was. Or diving into a pool of Jell-O. In his heyday on Tonight, from 1954 to 1956, Allen once delighted his fans by going out on the street dressed as a New York City police officer, hailing a taxi, hurling a huge salami into the back seat and ordering the driver to "take this to Grand Central Station." He read an assortment of things to the studio audience, finding much humor in the letters to the editor of the Daily News. He was especially fond of letters with signatures like "Disgusted, from the Bronx." He loved practical jokes. He put out a record album of piano music called The Discovery of Buck Hammer. It carried a picture of a pianist whose talent was said to have been discovered posthumously. Critics loved the album, only to learn that all the playing had been done by Allen. He would invite his studio audience to suggest song titles and then devise a lyric instantly. Once someone shouted the name of the bestseller of the day Dr. Zhivago, which led Allen to sit at the piano and sing to the tune of Chicago: Zhivago! Zhivago! Whenever I'm sick Zhivago! Zhivago! You cure me real quick. Among his other TV routines: parodying juvenile rock 'n' roll lyrics by reading them as if they were sublime poetry, and "The Question Man," in which someone would give him an answer and he would guess the question -- forerunner to Johnny Carson's "Karnac." In the early 1950s, Allen was a radio disc jockey and a panelist on What's My Line? before inaugurating The Tonight Show as a local program on NBC's New York affiliate in 1953. It moved to the network 15 months later, where it became so successful that NBC decided to put him up against CBS's giant, Ed Sullivan, in 1956. Allen cut back his Tonight schedule in the summer of 1956 to begin The Steve Allen Show. He left late-night television for good in January 1957. Among the comedians whose careers flourished on Allen's new show were Don Knotts, who played a terminally nervous individual, Mr. Morrison; Bill Dana, who appeared as a Latin astronaut, Jose Jimenez; Pat Harrington, who was Guido Panzini, an Italian golfer; Tom Poston, the very forgetful man; and Louis Nye, who played the always effete advertising executive Gordon Hathaway and who always called Allen "Steverino." The show ran through the 1959-60 season and was in syndication throughout the 1960s. The Steve Allen Comedy Hour, with some of the Tonight regulars, ran on CBS during the summer of 1967, and Allen was host of a similar variety show on NBC in 1980 and 1981. "All of us who have hosted the Tonight Show format owe a debt of gratitude to Steve Allen. He was a most creative innovator and brilliant entertainer," Carson said. In more than 50 years in show business, Allen demonstrated his talents in many areas. An accomplished pianist who never learned to read music, he composed thousands of songs, some of them hits. Among them were Impossible and Gravy Waltz. He wrote the lyrics for some movie music, including ballads heard in Picnic, Houseboat and On the Beach. He also wrote more than 50 books, all of them dictated into a small tape recorder that he always carried. They ranged from poetry and novels to social criticism, music, foreign affairs and, of course, humor. He was keenly interested in social justice and wrote pamphlets on a variety of issues, including the problems facing migrant workers, as well as capital punishment and nuclear proliferation. (He was opposed to both.) He once considered running for Congress from California, describing his politics as "middle of the road radicalism," which was his way of describing mid-century liberalism. Toward the end of his life, he spoke out and ran newspaper ads to rail against the increase of sexual content on television, including one ad that ran the day after his death in the Los Angeles Times. In a speech last year, he said tabloid TV talk shows have "taken television to the garbage dump." Allen was proudest of his Meeting of Minds series, which appeared on PBS from 1976 to 1979. He moderated a panel of actors impersonating historic figures such as Galileo, Emily Dickinson, Cleopatra (played by Meadows), Charles Darwin and Attila the Hun, who explained their philosophies. Allen acted in several movies and was a master of ceremonies or a guest on many television programs, including I've Got a Secret and What's My Line? At a dinner party in 1952, Allen was seated next to Jayne Meadows, sister of the Honeymooners star Audrey Meadows, who died in 1996. Uncharacteristically, he was speechless. At the end of the evening, she turned to him and said: "Mr. Allen, you're either the rudest man I ever met or the shyest." His reddened face indicated the latter. They married in 1954. Besides his wife and four sons, Allen is survived by 11 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. - Information from the Boston Globe, New York Times and Associated Press was used in this report.
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