http://www.old-time.com/otrlogs2/charlie_mg.html

(Be sure to visit the site and be amazed at the weekly guest list on the Chase and Sanborn Hour!)

 

                                             Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen

 

THE EDGAR BERGEN AND CHARLIE McCARTHY SHOW:

AN EPISODE GUIDE AND BRIEF HISTORY

by Martin Grams, Jr.

On his way home from school one day, the young lad named Edgar Bergen tested a newly-found gift by hailing another boy, who exclaimed, "Who was that calling me, anyhow?" Bergen was aware of his talent, and continued to practice his vocal tricks. He progressed so well that his mother was forever answering the door in response to pleas of old men who begged to be let in, only to discover that it was Bergen himself. When once a man stalked Bergen’s mother, it was his vocal talent through the other side of the door that scared her admirer away. Before long, Edgar’s interests had extended to slight of hand paraphernalia, and spent much of his small savings on magic tricks. One of his purchases was a twenty-five cent book on ventriloquism, with which he set about developing his talent for "voice diffusion."

Young Bergen went on to high school, attending the Lane Technical and Lakeview Schools. It was there that Charlie McCarthy was born. The inspiration for the impish dummy was a tough Irish newsboy, and the head was carved in white pine by a carpenter named Theodore Mack, who followed young Bergen’s specifications. In gratitude, Bergen added a Celtic suffix to the carpenter’s name – and Charlie McCarthy was christened. While Charlie’s head cost about thirty-five dollars, Bergen himself made the body. The newly whittled brash youth was an immediate success, delighting Bergen’s classmates and teachers. The dummy, incidentally, once helped his master pass an important history course by completely charming the teacher.

With the eclipse of vaudeville, in the early thirties Bergen polished his routine for nightclubs. He was very successful with an act he called "The Operation," in which he played the doctor. Charlie was the patient and a nurse was in attendance. (Edgar Bergen reprised this act in the beginning of RKO Studio’s 1941 movie Look Who’s Laughing.) This act was based on reality: Bergen had recently undergone an operation – he had argued with the doctors and experienced the usual qualms of a patient – all of which he transformed into a satirical comedy. But Bergen’s chance of fame came one night in 1936, on the invitation of Elsa Maxwell. He performed at a party where one of the guests, Noel Coward, congratulated Bergen on his fine dialogue. A week later, on December 16, Bergen made his first radio appearance on Rudy Vallee’s The Royal Gelatin Hour, for which he received the sum of one hundred and fifty dollars. That may not seem much by today’s standards, but in 1936 that was more than a month’s worth of wages. Five months later, in May of 1937, Chase and Sanborn began sponsoring The Chase and Sanborn Hour, starring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.

For the radio program, Bergen developed other characters, notably the slow-witted Mortimer Snerd

and the man-hungry Effie Klinker .

The star, however, was Charlie, who was always presented as a child (albeit in top hat, cape, and monocle) – a debonair, girl-crazy, child-about-town. As a child, and a wooden one at that, Charlie could get away with double entendre that adult humans could not under broadcast standards of the day.

Charlie: "May I have a kiss good-bye?"

Dale Evans: "Well, I can't see any harm in that!"

Charlie: "Oh. I wish you could. A harmless kiss doesn't sound very thrilling."

The Chase and Sanborn Hour

Broadcast from 8 to 9 p.m., EST over NBC

Master of Ceremonies: Don Ameche

Music: Werner Janseen conducts the music for the first seven broadcasts.

Music: Robert Armbruster will lead the orchestra beginning with episode eight till the early 1940s.

Regulars: Dorothy Lamour is a regular. W.C. Fields as comedian for the first eighteen broadcasts.

Throughout 1937 – 1940, Nelson Eddy was replaced by various tenors such as John Carter and Donald Dickson, in increments a few months while Eddy continuously went to Hollywood for the filming of movies at M-G-M. All of Eddy’s vacations are noted in the log.

1. Charlie McCarthy, though made of wood, was worth a fortune by mid-1938. He had a stand-in, used for cinema work and for some publicity stills; a wardrobe that included a supply of monocles, two full dress suits, a supply of starchy linen, ten hats size 3½, including several toppers and two berets; a Sherlock Holmes outfit, jockey silks, a cowboy suit, a French Foreign Legion uniform, a gypsy costume ("It’s the Gypsy in me"). he wore baby-size shows, spent $1,000 a year for wardrobe and laundry, was insured for $10,000 against kidnapping, loss or demolition.
2. In 1938, at 33^rd and Broadway in New York City, Charlie McCarthy fans could visit the fifth floor of the Gimbels Department Store and for $9.98, fans could purchase their own Charlie McCarthy and a book on ventriloquism. To give you an idea of how much Edgar Bergen was making off his creation, both he and Charlie collected $100,000 a year from the sale of dolls, gadgets, silverware and other copies of cocky Charlie. The March 20, 1939 issue of Time magazine reported that Edgar Bergen had recently made his last will and testament. In it he remembered Charlie, leaving $10,000 to the National Society of Ventriloquists so that Charlie might be kept in repair and used to encourage the perpetuation of the art.
3. Trivia: Ventriloquism was never a radio art. It still isn’t. But thoroughly part of radio art was Bergen’s clever deliveries with guests on his radio program, for which his alma mater, Northwestern University, in 1937 awarded Charlie the honorary degree of Master of Innuendo and Snappy comeback.

1. The episode of March 12, 1939 was broadcast from Manhattan’s Radio City – the first time the program had originated from anywhere but Hollywood since the program’s premiere. When the plan to do this was announces to the press, 60,000 Charlie McCarthy fans besieged NBC and the agency producing the show for admission to Radio City’s 1,318-seat Studio 8-H. A crowd of 5,000 was at the station when the Chase and Sanborn troupe arrived, but Charlie was nowhere to be seen. Photographers grouped Master of Ceremonies Don Ameche, darkling Sarongstress Dorothy Lamour and Baritone Donald Dickson for a picture. As they were sighting the group, a press agent brought another man over, a middling, fair, baldish chap with delicate , expressive lips. For one photographer up front, this man crowded the picture, blocked the view of the lissome Lamour. "Hey," he growled, "get that lug out of there." Little did the photographer know that the lug was Edgar Bergen. 

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By 1948, Edgar Bergen and his wooden pal Charlie McCarthy were at the top of their game. According to recent radio polls, their weekly radio program was still in the top ten. But the movie offers slowed, and ratings – although still high – was slipping little by little as the seasons pass. The gossip of television crept through the back stage and it was certain a ventriloquist would be more successful seen on television – but could the radio audience handle watching Bergen on television? They pictured the wooden dummy with a life of its own, and even movies like Look Who’s Laughing (1941) didn’t have Charlie McCarthy always in the same scenes as Edgar Bergen.

W.C. FIELDS: Is it true your father was a gate-leg table?

McCARTHY: If it is, your father was under it.

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After five hundred broadcasts, the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy program went off the air. Edgar Bergen began touring the stages of vaudeville to pass the time. In the summer of 1949, Edgar Bergen wrote this small editorial for the New York Times:

"After thirteen years of life on the half shell in Hollywood, I have made a trip where I wasn’t a tourist. The only depots that have known my luggage – and the luggage of most of my colleagues – for the last decade have been a couple of European capitols, New York and Palm Springs. I have just rediscovered America – an actor’s America, not a vacationist’s. For five weeks I’ve been back in my element, vaudeville: Buffalo, Hartford, Boston, Minneapolis, Detroit, Vancouver. A beautiful theatrical world of backstage, split weeks, singers, electricians, acrobats, property men, stagehands and jugglers.

So many people are working in vaudeville today that I looked for three weeks to book enough acts for an hour bill and didn’t have them until the night before we opened in Buffalo and money was no object! It all felt like a college play, enthusiastic, ambitious, somewhat extemporaneous with a few fine, old-fashioned professional hallmarks like the card game, which had been played persistently backstage since, I imagine, sometime shortly before Genesis. The actors hunch about their draw (it’s all canasta now, no more pinochle) and then with the agility of a pickpocket they drop their hands at the sound of a music cue, transform their expressions to match their costumes, glide onto the stage, have their say, and resume their play at the gaming tables without a flick of the eyelash.

The pace is faster than it was thirteen years ago. Maybe it is the war or the movies or because this generation was bred on radio comedy, but I found out that they want bombastic stuff with a lot of drive. They have little time for whimsy. It varies, of course, from town to town. The Hartford audience was sharper on some things than the Buffalo audience. Political jokes go, depending upon how the community votes. A Negro audience will pick up subtle comedy quicker than anyone else.

My friend Charlie McCarthy is, of course, much more of a celebrity than he was thirteen years ago. I found out something about Charlie’s friends this time. Charlie and I worked out a new act for the tour. It was based on the cherry tree episode in the life of George Washington. We both got lovely velvet costumes and powdered wigs. I thought Charlie looked fine as the father of our country. But something happened. They wanted to see McCarthy: striped pants, monocle, derby and Bergen’s bald head. If that had happened in radio, the reaction would have been slow, diffused and debatable. I wouldn’t learn anything from an audience sitting in a broadcasting studio in Hollywood because those people all are in my business.

You find out your mistakes from an audience that pays admission. When you look these people in the eye you know what is wrong and what is right with the act. If it’s good you can keep it in. If it’s bad you can get rid of it before the next show. In radio and television you can’t be sure of anything. And whatever is uttered over the air is irrevocable.

I am just as well pleased as we made a mistake with the George Washington act. It showed me I’m not immune from theatrical error. Now I’m on my toes. I took this tour to find out from the audience what they want. If I had strolled through with only the polite applause, such as rings in one’s ears after years in the free halls of entertainment of Hollywood, my trip would have been enjoyable but not enlightening. Nobody seems to know yet how television is going to affect the radio, movies, love, housekeeping or the church, but it has definitely revived vaudeville. I wish there be a guardian over vaudeville this time to protect the same people from killing it who killed it before – and several of them are back at the scene of the crime.

I would like to see a vaudeville world of three-a-day. Five-a-day is too many. Managers who are trying to profit at that rate will gorge themselves right out of business. You can’t put entertainment on a production line basis. Some people have asked me if I was back in vaudeville to get ready for television. As a matter of fact I went back to vaudeville to get ready for radio. After a sabbatical from radio for nearly a year, I needed to work with Charlie again. Ventriloquism is not like riding a bicycle. I have to keep practicing or Charlie would sit tongue-tied, silently staring at me with the chill eye of a department store dummy."

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In October of 1949, the Coca-Cola Company signed a lucrative contract, allowing for a larger budget (thus the addition of weekly guest stars) with the option to renew every few months. Coca-Cola would end up sponsoring the program for three seasons! Now known as The Charlie McCarthy Show, the program returned to its ever-familiar time-slot of Sunday evenings, from 8 to 8:30 p.m., EST.

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Charlie and Edgar's last season was 1955 - 1956.  They went on to make many television appearances.  Edgar Bergen died in 1978. It is said that Charlie McCarthy died along with Bergen: "Since retiring to the Smithsonian Institution in 1978, Charlie has uttered not one, single, solitary word." 

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAQ60VQ_xm0  Charlie "At the Races".