Background and career
Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen (December 26, 1921 – October 30, 2000) was an American television and radio personality, comedian, musician, composer, writer, and actor. Though he got his start in radio, he is best known for his extensive network television career. Allen gained national attention as a guest host on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. In 1954, he achieved further national fame as the co-creator and first host of The Tonight Show, which was the first late-night nationwide television talk show. He then went on to host numerous game and variety shows, including his own The Steve Allen Show, I've Got a Secret, and The New Steve Allen Show. He was a regular panel member on CBS's What's My Line? and, from 1977 until 1981, he wrote, produced, and hosted the award-winning public broadcasting show Meeting of Minds, a series of historical dramas presented in a talk format. Allen was a pianist and a prolific composer. By his own estimate, he wrote more than 8,500 songs, some of which were recorded by numerous leading singers. Allen won the 1964 Grammy Award for Best Original Jazz Composition for "Gravy Waltz," for which he wrote the lyrics. He also wrote more than 50 books, including novels, children's books, and books of opinions, including his final book, Vulgarians at the Gate: Trash TV and Raunch Radio (2001). In 1996, Allen was presented with the Martin Gardner Lifetime Achievement Award from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSICOP). He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and The Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood named in his honor.
Allen was born in New York City, the only child of Billy Allen (né Carroll Abler), of German ancestry, and Belle Montrose (born Isabelle Donohue) a husband-and-wife vaudeville comedy team. His birth name was Stephen Valentine Allen, but he later acquired two additional names, Patrick and William, during his childhood. He got the middle name Valentine from vaudeville actor, Val Stanton who was a close friend of the family. His father died when he was an infant. Allen was raised on the South Side of Chicago largely by his mother's Irish Catholic family. Milton Berle called Allen's mother "the funniest woman in vaudeville." Allen ran away from home at 16 and described in interviews the ease with which he took to begging. Allen's first radio job was on station KOY, in Phoenix, Arizona, after he left Arizona State Teachers College (now Arizona State University), in Tempe, while a sophomore. He enlisted in the United States Army during World War II in 1943. Trained as an infantryman, he served his enlistment period at Camp Roberts, California. Due to frequent asthma attacks, he was given a medical discharge from the Army after serving five months. Afterward, he returned to Phoenix, before moving back to California.
Allen became an announcer for radio KFAC in Los Angeles, then moved to the Mutual Broadcasting System in 1946, talking the station into airing his five-nights-a-week comedy show Smile Time, co-starring Wendell Noble. After Allen moved to CBS Radio's KNX in Los Angeles, his music-and-talk half-hour format gradually changed to include more talk in an hour-long late-night format, boosting his popularity and creating standing-room-only studio audiences. During a show's segment, Allen went into the audience with a microphone to ad lib on the air for the first time. This became a commonplace part of his studio performances for many years. His program attracted a huge local following; as the host of a 1950 summer replacement show for the popular comedy Our Miss Brooks, he found himself in front of a national audience for the first time.
Allen's first television experience came in 1949, when he answered an advertisement for a television announcer for professional wrestling. Knowing nothing about wrestling, he watched some shows to gain insight and discovered that the announcers did not have well-defined names for the wrestling holds: when he got the job, he created names for many of the holds, some of which still are in use. After the first match got under way, Allen began ad-libbing in a comedic style that had audiences outside the arena laughing. An example: Leone gives Smith a full nelson now, slipping it up from either a half-nelson or an Ozzie Nelson. Now the boys go into a double pretzel bend with variations on a theme by Veloz and Yolanda. After CBS radio gave Allen a weekly prime time show, CBS television believed he could be groomed for national television stardom and gave him his first network show. The Steve Allen Show premiered at 11 a.m. on Christmas Day, 1950, and was later moved to a thirty-minute, early evening slot. The new show required him to relocate, with his family, from Los Angeles to New York. It ran until 1952, after which CBS tried several different formats to showcase Allen's talent. He achieved national attention in early January 1951, when he was pressed into last-minute service to guest host the hugely popular Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts when Godfrey was unable to appear. He turned one of Godfrey's live Lipton tea and soup commercials upside down, preparing tea and instant soup on camera, then pouring both into Godfrey's iconic ukulele. With the audience (including Godfrey, watching from Miami) laughing uproariously and thoroughly entertained, Allen gained major plaudits both as a comedian and as a host. Variety magazine editors who had seen the show wrote, "One of the most hilarious one-man comedy sequences projected over the TV cameras in many a day ... The guy's a natural for the big time." Leaving CBS, Allen briefly hosted a talent-competition program on ABC called Talent Patrol in the first months of 1953. At the same time, he became a regular on the popular panel television game show What's My Line? from January 1953, substituting for the suspended Hal Block, and replacing Block by March. He continued on the show until 1954, and returned frequently as a panelist until the series ended in 1967. He once appeared as a regular contestant on June 19, 1966, but the panel failed to guess his line, which was selling motorcycles; Allen at the time was co-owner of a Los Angeles dealership selling Honda motorcycles. Those introducing him as a panelist sometimes jokingly called him the son of panelist Fred Allen, but the two men were unrelated. He also revived and popularized the question "Is it bigger than a breadbox?" while trying to guess the products associated with What's My Line? contestants.
He then created The Knickerbocker Beer Show (also known as The Steve Allen Show), a late-night local New York talk/variety television program that debuted in July 1953 on local station WNBT-TV (now WNBC-TV). The following year, on September 27, 1954, the show went on the full NBC network as The Tonight Show, with fellow radio personality Gene Rayburn (who later went on to host hit game shows such as Match Game, 1962–1982) as the original announcer. The show ran from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. on the East Coast, with Allen also hosting a truncated Knickerbocker Beer Show as a local lead-in from 11:15 to 11:30. While Today developer Sylvester "Pat" Weaver often is credited as the Tonight creator, Allen often pointed out that he had created it earlier as a local New York show. Allen told his nationwide audience that first evening: "This is Tonight, and I can't think of too much to tell you about it except I want to give you the bad news first: This program is going to go on forever ... You think you're tired now. Wait until you see one o'clock roll around!" It was as host of The Tonight Show that Allen pioneered the "man on the street" comedic interviews and audience-participation comedy breaks that went on to become staples of late-night TV.
In June 1956, NBC offered Allen a new prime-time, Sunday night variety hour, The Steve Allen Show. NBC's goal was to dethrone CBS's top-rated The Ed Sullivan Show. The show included a typical run of star performers, including early television appearances by rock-and-roll pioneers Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Fats Domino. Many popular television and film personalities were guest stars, including Bob Hope, Kim Novak, Errol Flynn, Abbott and Costello, Esther Williams, Jerry Lewis, Martha Raye, The Three Stooges, Sammy Davis, Jr., Shelley Winters, Edward Everett Horton, and a host of others. The show's regulars were Tom Poston, Louis Nye, Bill Dana, Don Knotts, Pat Harrington, Jr., Dayton Allen, and Gabriel Dell. Dell was the only show-business veteran, having appeared in the Bowery Boys, Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, and East Side Kids film series. Allen's other regulars were relatively obscure performers prior to their stints with Allen, and all went on to stardom. The comedians in Allen's gang often were seen in his "Man in the Street" interviews about some topical subject. Poston would appear as a dullard who could not remember his own name. Nye's character was an effete advertising executive named Gordon Hathaway, known for greeting the host with "Hi ho, Steverino!" Dana played amiable Latino "Jose Jimenez." Knotts was an exceedingly jittery man who, when asked if he was nervous, invariably replied with an alarmed "No!". Harrington was the Italian immigrant and former golf-pro Guido Panzini. Dayton Allen, who had gotten his start playing various characters on the children's television series "Howdy Doody," played wild-eyed zanies answering any given question with the question "Why not?" Dell usually played straight men in sketches (policemen, newsmen, dramatic actors, etc.), and occasionally played the character Boris Nadel, a Bela Lugosi/Dracula lookalike. Other recurring routines included "Crazy Shots" (also known as "Wild Pictures"), a series of sight gags accompanied by Allen on piano; Allen inviting audience members to select three musical notes at random, and then composing a song based on the notes; a satire on radio's long-running The Answer Man and a precursor to Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent (sample answer: "Et tu, Brute." Allen's reply: "How many pizzas did you eat, Caesar?"); and overdramatic readings of real letters to the editor from New York City newspapers. Allen's show also had one of the longest unscripted "crack-ups" on live television when Allen began laughing hysterically during "Big Bill Allen's Sports Roundup". Allen, known for his infectious high-pitched cackling laugh, laughed uncontrollably for over a minute with the audience laughing along, because, as he later explained, he caught sight of his unkempt hair on an off-camera monitor. He kept brushing his hair and changing hats to hide the messy hair, and the more he tried to correct his appearance the messier and funnier it got. Allen helped the then-new Polaroid camera become popular by demonstrating its instant-picture capabilities during live commercials and amassed a huge financial windfall for his work because he had opted to be paid for it in Polaroid Corporation stock. Allen remained host of "Tonight" for three nights a week (Monday and Tuesday nights were taken up by guest hosts for most of the summer of 1956; then by Ernie Kovacs through January) until early 1957 when he left the show to devote his attention to the Sunday night program. It was his (and NBC's) hope that The Steve Allen Show could defeat Ed Sullivan in the ratings. Nevertheless, Maverick often bested both in audience size. In September 1959, Allen relocated to Los Angeles and left Sunday night television (the 1959–'60 season originated from NBC Color City in Burbank as The Steve Allen Plymouth Show, on Monday nights). Back in Los Angeles, he continued to write songs, hosted other variety shows, and wrote books and articles about comedy. After being canceled by NBC in 1960, the show returned in the fall of 1961—on ABC, as The New Steve Allen Show. Nye, Poston, Harrington, Dell, and Dayton Allen returned. New cast members were Joey Forman, Buck Henry, the Smothers Brothers, Tim Conway, and Allen's wife Jayne Meadows. The new version was canceled after fourteen episodes.
