Four celebrity stories from Author Ben Bryant’s “Three Stages”
- Posted on 19th August 2014
- in celebrity stories online, celebrity story, Entertainment, entertainment books, Hollywood books, Hollywood memoirs
- by Ben
Four celebrity stories in one blog post. A new record. This is excerpted from Three Stages, Chapter 5: Back to the Biz – 1962.
“Over the next few months I worked on several TV shows including The Jack Benny Program where I played a GI at one of Mr. Benny’s USO Shows; also Leave It to Beaver and The Bill Dana Show.
“Jack Benny was so natural doing his lines that you couldn’t tell what was dialog and what was chatting, and he too was unassuming and friendly. When [my agent] Kingsley Colton, who took over the agency after Mitch died, called me for Beaver I didn’t even know what the show was. I didn’t watch much TV in those days.
“I got the job on The Bill Dana Show in an unusual way. One afternoon Kingsley called and asked me my suit size. I told him and he said, “Don’t go anywhere.” A few minutes later he called back and said I was working the Dana show the next day. Bill Dana played a bellhop, “Jose Jimenez”, in a hotel and that week’s guest star was Danny Thomas. The gag was that when he arrived Bill and three other bellhops would serenade him with a barbershop quartet. The actor they had hired as the lead singer got sick but they had already fitted him with the suit so they needed a singer/actor who would fit the costume. There’s an old showbiz joke (based on road company replacements) that says, “He got the job because he fit the suit.” I became a living example of that joke.”
*******
“Sometime in ‘61 or ‘62 I had a silent bit in The Last Time I Saw Archie, a movie directed by Jack Webb. I was sitting at a table with the Dodgers’ pitcher Don Drysdale doing a (no dialogue) reaction to something he said. During the couple of hours we sat there I learned that he had gone to North Hollywood High and we discovered that we had played football against each other.”
Drysdale and I had a lot of fun reminiscing about the last game between the North Hollywood Huskies* and the Hollywood Sheiks. After some discussion we figured out that he was the linebacker who gave me a bloody nose. But I did make the first down.
Jack Webb was a lot like Sgt. Joe Friday who he has played on Dragnet, terse and all business.
Tags: Bill Dana, Don Drysdale, Jack Benny, Jack Webb
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