Articles

Allan Sherman - November 20, 1973 - What's In Print

SHERMAN, ALLAN

 

Nov. 30, 1924- Comedian; television writer; producer Address: b. c/o Warner Brothers Records, 4000 Warner Blvd., Burbank, Calif. 91505 In October 1962, after fifteen years as a television writer and producer, round-faced, bespectacled Allan Sherman achieved overnight fame as a singing comedian with the long-playing record My Son, the Folk Singer, an album of old folk tunes with new lyrics by Sherman satirizing urban Jewish mores. The album became the fastest-selling item in the history of the record industry. It was followed in December 1962 by My Son, the Celebrity, another album of his parodies written in what one critic called the "Manhattan delicatessen style" and delivered, as another said, in "pure nasal Brooklynese." His third album, My Son, the Nut, issued in 1963, included the song for which he is best known, "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah." As a television producer Sherman specialized in game and panel shows, and he was a co-creator of I've Got a Secret.

Allan Sherman was born Allan Copelon on November 30, 1924 at the Lutheran Deaconess Hospital in Chicago of Jewish parents. His father, Percy Copelon, originally from Birmingham, Alabama, was a racing car driver, automobile mechanic, and inventor. At one time, he owned the largest automotive garage in Chicago. His mother, Rose Sherman, was "a flapper, and what we would now call a 'swinger,' " as Sherman recalled in his autobiography, A Gift of Laughter (Atheneum, 1965).

When Sherman was six years old, his parents were divorced. he remained in the custody of his mother and eventually took her maiden name as his own. The mother remarried three times and changed residences often. By the time he graduated from high school, Sherman had attended twenty-one public schools in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York. He frequently visited his grandparents in Chicago, where his grandfather took him to Yiddish plays, which instilled in him a love for the theater.

After graduation from high school in 1941, Sherman entered the University of Illinois, where he was on the staff of the Daily Illini, the undergraduate newspaper, and wrote a daily column of humor, gossip, and doggerel entitled "The Compus Scout." He enlisted in the United States Army in December 1942 but was medically discharged for asthmatic allergies five months later. Returning to the university, he wrote the libretto and lyrics for Nothing Ventured, the varsity musical show of 1943, in which he played a farcical Adolph Hitler. He also wrote, to the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, a campus musical with a patriotic wartime theme. In 1943 he met his future wife, Delores Chackes, who was a fellow student at Illinois. In July 1944 Sherman, with Miss Chackes and another couple, entered a sorority house that was closed for the summer to use the sorority's phonograph. Arrested for trespassing, Miss Chackes was suspended from the university and Sherman was expelled.

After his expulsion from the university, Sherman returned to Chicago, then his home, and began frequenting Gibby's, a bar popular with show business people. At Gibby's he gave impromptu renditions of comic songs he had written. On the advice of actor Edmond O'Brien and jazz pianist Joe Buschkin, who were impressed with his material, Sherman left for New York in May 1945 with a portfolio of some seventy-five of his songs. One, "Merry Christmas," was published by the Famous Music Corporation, but it was a commercial failure.

Before the end of May 1945, Sherman found employment in New York as gag writer for Lew Parker, a radio comedian, but soon, after a quarrel over some of Sherman's material, Parker's head writer fired him. Through Jack Pulaski of Variety, Sherman met Willie Weber, an agent for several comedians, including Jackie Gleason and Jack E. Leonard. He began grinding out a regular diet of jokes and songs for Weber's clients, but payment from Weber was, according to Sherman, erratic. For thirteen weeks he wrote for the early television variety show Cavalcade of Stars, starring Jerry Lester, on the Dumont network, and for three weeks he was one of the writers for Broadway Open House, also starring Lester. After leaving Lester's staff he was head writer for a few weeks for The 54th Street Revue, another television variety show. During this period of time for television comedians, Sherman built up a file of 20,000 jokes, culled from old joke books, magazines, and other sources.

In August 1951 Sherman and Howard Merrill, both out of work, created the idea for I've Got a Secret, a game panel show, which they immediately sold to Goodson-Todman Productions for one dollar with the assurance of royalties of $125 a week if and when the show went on the air. I've Got a Secret has its premiere on June 19, 1952, with Sherman as associate producer at a salary of $125 a week. A Year later was made full producer. In 1958, after almost six years in the top ten in the ratings, the show was sold by Goodson and Todman to CBS for almost $2,00,00.

Gooson and Todman offered Sherman an executive position on their staff in 1958, but he declined because he wished to be free to do independent work. While continuing to produce I've Got a Secret he became producer and head writer for television specials for Victor Borge and Phil Silvers. Goodson and Todman felt that Sherman's outside interests interfered with his work for I've Got a Secret, and there was a rapid deterioration in relations between them and Sherman, culminating in their firing him.

After weeks of unemployment, Sherman reluctantly accepted the job of producing Masquerade Party, a hitherto unsuccessful game show that was threatened with cancellation. Under Sherman's guiding hand, it rose into the to ten in the ratings and ran for two years. Soon Sherman was in constant demand as a doctor for ailing television shows, at fees as high as $1,250 per week. In 1960, together with Allie Singer, he invented a game show called Your Surprise Package for CBS. The network sent him to Los Angeles to produce the show.

In Hollywood, Sherman and his family rented a house next door to the home of Harpo Marx. At a party at Marx's Jack Benny, George Burns, Milton Berle, and others heard Sherman sing parodies he had written of show tunes, and he soon became a much sought-after figure at Holly wood parties. At one party he caught the attention of Bullet's Durgom, the agent and manager who had guided Jackie Gleason's meteor rise.

In 1962 Your Surprise Package was canceled by CBS and Sherman went on unemployment insurance. He was hired by the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company to produce a new late-night variety show starring Steve Allen, but Westinghouse fired him before the first program went on the air. Back on unemployment insurance and growing increasingly desperate financially, Sherman approached the Capitol and Warner Brothers record companies with some of his musical comedy parodies. Warner Brothers expressed an interest and Sherman negotiated a contract with the help of Bullets Durgom. Mike Maitland of Warner Brothers suggested that, rather then parodying Broadway show tunes, which involve copyright problems, Sherman should write travesties of folk songs, which are in the public domain. In three weeks Sherman wrote all the songs for his first album. "Frere Jacques" became "Sarah Jackman,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was transformed into the saga of a cutter in Irving Roth's garment factory, who stood fast during a catastrophic fire. It concluded with the cutter, Harry Lewis, "trampling through the warehouse where the drapes of Roth are stored. . . . Glory, glory Harry Lewis." The other parodies included "My Zelda," spoofing "Waltzing Matilda," and "Seltzer Boy," to the tune of "Water Boy."

Sherman recorded the songs early in the fall of 1962, with Lou Busch accompanying him on the piano. The album, called My Son, the Folksinger, was released by Warner Brothers in October 1962. The response was unexpectedly overwhelming. The LP sold 65,000 copies in the first week and over 500,000 in the first month. Ultimately, over 1,250,000 copies were sold, and Sherman received a Gold Album, the award given for albums that net more than one million dollars wholesale.

The success of the album prompted Sherman to plan a concert tour, highlighted by appearances at Carnegie Hall on December 28 and December 31, 1962. In his concerts Sherman sang some of the show tunes parodies he had been unable to record for copyright reasons, including travesties of works by Meredith Willson and Rodgers and Hammerstein. "The only people unhappy about Allan Sherman are the songwriters whose songs he has parodied," Maurice Zolotow wrote in the Saturday Evening Post (April 20, 1963). "He has been getting letters from music publishers threatening him with lawsuits if he doesn't stop. Meredith Wilson didn't like the fact that Sherman transformed 'Seventy-six Trombones' into an ode to a Jewish country club: 'Seventy-six Sol Cohens in the country club,/And a hundred and ten nice men named Levine.' And Richard Rodgers detested what Sherman did to "There is Nothing Like a Dame" ["There Is Nothing Like a Lox"]. . . .'Allan Sherman is a destroyer,' was the glum comment of Rodgers."

Sherman's second album, My Son, the Celebrity, another Gold Album winner, was released on the day of his first Carnegie Hall concert. The most popular song in the album, "Harvey and Sheila" (based on the Israeli folk song "Hava Nagila"), was also issued separately and sold 600,000 copies as a single. Among the other songs in the album were parodies of "Bill Bailey" ("Won't you come home, Disraeli?") and "Aura Lee" ("Every time you take a vaccine, take it orally"), and "The Let's All Call Up AT & T and Protest to the President March," an anti-digit dialing song.

My Son, the Nut, Sherman's third album, was released in the early summer of 1963. A single from that album, "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah," cast in the form of a complaining letter from a child in summer camp to his parents, and sung to the music of "Dance of the Hours" from the opera La Goicanda by Ponchielli, became the number one song in the United Stares and sold over 1,000,000 copies before Labor Day of the same summer. Surprisingly, it was also number one in Hong Kong, where there are no children' s camps, and in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

On July 19, 1963 Sherman gave a concert at the Hollywood Bowl before a crowd of more than 18,000 people, the largest Friday night audience in the history of the bowl. During that summer, he also played the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, Grossinger's and the Concord in the Catskill Mountains, and Freedomland, the now defunct New York amusement park, where he broke the attendance record. He had also begun appearing for in such nightclubs as the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, the Crescendo in Los Angeles, and the Copacabana in New York. He became a frequently guest on television, and from August 5 to 9, 1963 he replaced vacationing Johnny Carson as host of the Tonight show. His gross income in 1963 was over $500,000.

In July 1964, after making a number of pre-election appearances for President Lyndon B. Johnson, Sherman gave a concert parodying classical music with the concert with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. The concert was recorded by RCA Victor Red Seal Records at the Tanglewood Music Festival on July 22, 1964, when Sherman performed with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra before the largest crowd in the history of the festival. He also created two other records in 1964 for Warner Brothers. The first, Allan in Wonderland, was released in January; the second, For Swingin' Livers Only, in October. Another LP, My Name is Allan, was released in October 1965 by Warner Brothers.

On January 18, 1965 Sherman graduated to a program of his own on NBC-TV, a one-shot special entitled Allan Sherman's Funnyland. Sherman was reportedly told by NBC to keep ethnic flavor out of the show. Thus cut off from the Jewish jokes and nuances that had salted much of his previous material, he resorted heavily to humor that Bob Williams in the New York Post (January 19, 1965) characterized as "too cute for comfort," and drew unenthusiastic reviews. Alan Patureau of Newsday, (January 19, 1965) called the program "a disappointing hour of half-hearted Shermania."

Allan Sherman and Delores Miriam Chackes were married on June 15, 1945. They have two children, Robbie and Nancy. According to a report in Newsweek (June 20, 1966), Mrs. Sherman filed suit for divorce on June 8, 1966. Sherman is five feet seven inches tall and weighs about 225 pounds. Nora Ephron in the New York Post article compared his appearance to that of "an intellectual, overstuffed owl," and a writer in Time (January 4, 1963) described him as "a plump, crew-cut chipmunk man with black-rimmed glasses and a blinky diffidence that suggests he would like to make apologies throughout the harbor for the fact that his ship came in so fast." Richard Gehman once said that Sherman's voice is like that of "a strangling mynah bird." and in his autobiography Sherman himself called his singing "lousy." Sherman's hobbies include model railroading, photography, antique collecting, and golf. Sherman has reportedly been working on a film adaptation of Robert Paul Smith's book Where Did You Go? Out. What did you Do? Nothing.

References
N Y Post TV Section p1 Ag '63 por
N Y Times II p13 Ag 4 '63
Sat Eve Post p26+ Ap 20 '63 pors
Sherman, Allan. A Gift of Laughter (1965)