Jackie Gleason: 1986 Playboy Interview

Think about this: In some markets, Ted Koppel and his Nightline are getting serious competition from a fat, irascible bus driver named Ralph Kramden, the main character in a sitcom that's 30 years old. Of course, as far as many diehard Honeymooners fans are concerned, it would take a full-scale attack by Libya and a hostage crisis, to boot, for them to switch from that one-room tenement in a Brooklyn neighborhood that never was.

Which is why it's not at all surprising that today 70-year-old Herbert John Gleason—a.k.a. Ralph Kramden, a.k.a. The Great One (that last appellation courtesy of Orson Welles)—is basking in a sort of recycled sunshine. The principal cause of this new light is a batch of Honeymooners segments—henceforth known as the lost episodes—that carry with them the import of a mislaid Mozart symphony. Unseen since their original broadcast some 30 years ago, the 62 long-stashed kinescopes were preserved in a chilled Miami vault and have only recently been excavated. Before that discovery, a scant 39 half hours of Honeymooners, filmed during the 1955-1956 television season, constituted the incomplete canon of Kramdenia. Subsequently tagged the classic 39 by purists, these episodes have been rerun in some markets hundreds of times apiece, gleaning new generations of devotees along the way.

The Great One's new popularity may well be the sweetest renaissance ever experienced by a living actor. There's RALPH (the Royal Association for the Longevity and Preservation of The Honeymooners), whose membership boasts 12,000 card-carrying disciples—Honeymoonies?—among them, Bruce Springsteen and Cyndi Lauper. Then there's the newly published, reverential tome The Official Honeymooners Treasury. In March, Gleason was inducted into the Television Academy's Hall of Fame. And on its heels, there's a campaign to see that he at last gets a special Emmy award to make up for the one that has somehow eluded him during the span of his remarkable career.

If celebrity is just as sweet the second time around, we at Playboy remember the challenge it was to get Jackie Gleason to sit for his Playboy Interview more than 23 years ago. It was 1962, and Gleason, then a barreling locomotive of showbiz high life, was tearing along at breakneck speed. With his Honeymooners gig supposedly a thing of the past, he had knocked off five movies in two years: The Hustler (for which he garnered his lone Oscar nomination), with Paul Newman; Gigot (his auteur Chaplinesque classic); Soldier in the Rain, with Steve McQueen; Requiem for a Heavyweight, with Anthony Quinn; and the overlooked gem Papa's Delicate Condition.
The mush-lush albums of mood music he churned out with his Jackie Gleason Orchestra clogged the record charts. His trademark catch phrases—"Awa-a-ay we go," "You're goin' to the moon" and "How sweet it is!"—were stapled firmly to national consciousness. And, of course, every detail of The Jackie Gleason Show, which ranked sturdily in the top ten, was personally supervised by its economy-sized namesake.

Two years after his Playboy Interview, Gleason demanded that CBS move production of his blockbuster show to the balmier clime of Miami Beach, Florida. Naturally, the network acquiesced, and Gleason became an instant state treasure.

So he is today among the last of the all-purpose show-business legends, a dinosaur who defiantly stomped wherever he pleased in the realm of performance and conquered all comers. Even Ralph Kramden, an occasional victim of hyperbolic delusion, would have justifiably argued that The Honeymooners was easily the biggest thing that Jackie Gleason ever got into (his wife, Alice, however, might have countered that it was his pants). There's no doubt that Kramden was Gleason's role of a lifetime. As John O'Hara once wrote, "Ralph Kramden is a character we might be getting from Mr. Dickens if he were writing for TV."

Gleason first tried Ralph Kramden on for size in 1951, while hosting Cavalcade of Stars on the DuMont network. In 1952, he hatched The Jackie Gleason Show on CBS, and The Honeymooners came with it. So popular were the sketches that Gleason—notorious for demanding elephantine sums of money—signed a $15,000,000 contract with Buick, promising two seasons of self-contained Honeymooners shows starting in 1955. After the first year, he backed out of the commitment, contending that his standards for the show couldn't be maintained. He then sold "the classic 39" into syndication for the relative pittance of $2,000,000.

Yet holding out may be the best revenge: Last year Gleason, for an undisclosed (read staggering) chunk, sold to Viacom International the syndication rights to all the remaining Honeymooners sketches—ranging in length from ten minutes to nearly an hour—staged on the CBS variety show between 1952 and 1957. Showtime began beaming "the lost episodes" over cable last September, and the shows are ready to go into general syndication next month throughout the United States.

As the grandiloquent Great One told us in the 1962 grilling, it was more of a shimmy up from the streets of Brooklyn than a meteoric, overnight bounce to superstardom. It went something like this:

Born in Bushwick on February 26, 1916, he was introduced to vaudeville at an early age by his hard-drinking father, who skipped town when Jackie was eight. His mother, a coddling woman, died in 1935 and Gleason, who'd been lingering in Brooklyn pool halls, left for Manhattan's club circuit.

Jack L. Warner saw Gleason's club act in 1941 and nailed him to a studio contract. In 1948, Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town program greased Gleason's television debut. The next year brought the short-lived Life of Riley series, and then came 1950, when Gleason was tapped to front Cavalcade of Stars.

And from there, away he went. . . .

Those are the facts. A little harder to pin down are the legends of Gleason's full life: the "broads," as he still calls them, the booze, the fits of ego, the star turns. To this day, he signs letters The Great Gleason. He has ripsnorted with the best (Sinatra, Bogey, DiMaggio, Duke Wayne), shot pool with Willie Mosconi, golfed with Richard Nixon.

His first marriage (to Genevieve Halford—it survived 34 years and produced two daughters) ended in 1970. His second, to former Baltimore secretary Beverly McKittrick, lasted only four years. And late in 1975, he went for number three: Marilyn Taylor Horwich—sister of his longtime choreographer June Taylor—with whom he has fallen in love when she danced on his show 20 years earlier. This marriage, now in its 11th year, is flourishing.

In 1970, The Jackie Gleason Show, whose ratings hovered in the top 20, was canceled when demographics portrayed its audience as over the hill. Gleason moved into a home on the grounds of the Inverrary Country Club in the Fort Lauderdale area, just off a golf course christened The Great One. Until 1979, he hosted the popular Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic there.

Eight years ago, while in Chicago touring with Sly Fox, he suffered a heart attack. Triple-bypass surgery led to a full recovery.

Aside from reruns, Gleason's television profile dwindled. There were three Honeymooners specials, a Dean Martin roast and the CBS movie Izzy and Moe, which reteamed him with Art Carney. Recent film work, none extraordinary, has included the Smokey and the Bandit trilogy, with Burt Reynolds, The Toy, with Richard Pryor, and The Sting II, which was simply a mistake.

Gleason's forthcoming film, Nothing in Common, scheduled for release this summer, promises a return to acting of substance. Directed by Garry (Happy Days, The Flamingo Kid) Marshall, it's billed as "a very serious comedy" about the irreparable relationship between a young ad exec (Tom Hanks) and his cantankerous father (Gleason).

Since The Great One refuses to give interviews of any sort in his home—they remind him too much of work—we dispatched Bill Zehme to infiltrate the Chicago set of Nothing in Common, where Gleason agreed to fill in the gaps of the past two decades and reminisce about his glorious second honeymoon. Zehme reports:

"On my first day with Jackie Gleason, he ate a bus driver alive. The square-off happened within the fictional confines of a movie scene: His character sideswipes a rapid-transit vehicle on Chicago's North Side and, like Ralph Kramden, refuses to accept the blame himself. As the cameras whirred, Gleason's temper steadily went white-hot. The eyes bugged. The jowls billowed. The voice roared. It was thrilling, probably somewhat metaphorical and just slightly foreboding.

"I was pleasantly surprised, though. The Great One, it seems, has gone marshmallowy. He was as serene as a snoozing lynx. He was kind, avuncular and generous. I hunkered down in his padded trailer and logged dozens of hours with him between exterior shots around the Windy City. 'It helps pass the time,' he often acknowledged. During much of that time, his wife, Marilyn, sat with us, doing needlework and listening. He frequently flirted with her. As I plied him with questions, some of them plainly impertinent, he sat, smoked (a couple of packs per session), nibbled cheese, guzzled cinnamon-spiced coffee (unspiked) and never one threatened to send me to the moon.

"He chooses not to trifle with introspection. He is, however, a nostalgic swoon. Charmed with the notion of doing his second Playboy Interview, he leaped at the chance to review his first one before we got under way. Not that he is unimpressed with what he means to people today. I watched one afternoon when a pale young woman approached Gleason on the street and asked for an autograph to give her dying father. The Great One obliged and, handing back her paper scrap, announced grandly, 'This will give him ten more years.'"