Steve Allen is comedian and creator of the Tonight Show and the Steve Allen Show. He is a composer, singer, producer, conductor, a songwriter of more than 4,000 songs, and the author of over 38 books. He is a political activist, a Humanist Laureate for the Academy of Humanism, and the producer of the award-winning PBS-TV network series Meeting of Minds, a "talk show" with some of history's most significant figures, with Mr. Allen acting as host. His tireless efforts on behalf of the promotion of science, skepticism, and humanism have kept these movements on the cutting edge in the media and popular culture. His book Dumbth was a national bestselling social commentary on the state of U.S. education.
The 1980s and '90s (to date) have been the busiest in the almost 50-year career of Steve Allen, who in 1986 was inducted into the TV Academy's Hall of Fame. In the '50s and '60s, when involved with weekly or nightly TV series, his extraneous activities were necessarily limited. Today, although he continues to appear as guest on network and syndicated programs, Allen now finds more time to write books, star in occasional dramatic shows, play major concerts and nightclubs around the country, compose more songs and record more albums.
During the 1980s, Allen starred in two limited prime-time series for NBC- The Big Show and The Steve Allen Comedy Hour-produced the fourth season of his Emmy and Peabody award-winning Meeting of Minds for PBS and garnered critical acclaim for his hosting of an annual Emmy Awards Show, stepping in at the last minute during an ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike (and contributing his fee to the unions' strike fund). In New York, his comedy musical Seymour Glick is Alive but Sick was greeted with critical raves during its limited five-week stand at the St. Regis Hotel.
Through the '80s and '90s, Allen turned out nineteen new books, bringing his total to 43 published works. Among the new titles were: Funny People; The Talk Show Murders, Beloved Son: A Story of the Jesus Cults, More Funny People; How To Make a Speech; How to be Funny, Murder on the Glitter Box, The Passionate Nonsmoker's Bill of Rights (co-authored with Bill Adler Jr.); Meeting of Minds (a four-volume set of scripts from the TV series), Dumbth: And 81 Ways to Make Americans Smarter, The Public Hating (a collection of short stories); Murder in Manhattan, Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion & Morality, Murder in Vegas, Hi-Ho, Steverino!: My Adventures in the Wonderful Wacky World of Television, The Murder Game, More Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion & Morality. Book Two, and Make'em Laugh, and Reflections. Additionally, the successful How To Be Funny was re-released by Prometheus Books in 1992.
The multi-talented comedian, writer, composer, lyricist, actor, concert artist, lecturer (ad infinitum) is a tall (6'3"), 200-pound man, married for 39 years to the beautiful and versatile actress Jayne Meadows. They live in a comfortable hillside house overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Frequent visitors are their son, Bill (William Christopher), former president of MTM Television in Hollywood, and Steve's three sons by his first marriage: Steve Jr., a doctor in Ithaca, New York; Brian, a real estate broker in Seattle; and David, a songwriter in San Francisco.
Allen's clear and open mind enables him to move lightly from the most complex subjects to nutty comedy. He uses it like a mine on a 24-hour-a-day digging schedule, finding ideas literally while waking and sleeping. Always ready to extract them, Allen has small tape-recorders everywhere: in his pockets, in the bathroom, by his bed, in his car. This system supplies the raw material for the numerous Allen activities.
"I'm always busy," he notes, "but always doing things I enjoy. I rarely occupy myself with things that bug me. I'm very fortunate in that not many of us are allowed to move around for kicks and get paid for it."
But it is sometimes difficult for the observer to get the man in focus: Steve Allen is, for example, a television comedian of forty years' standing who has written a scholarly treatise on migratory farm labor titled The Ground is our Table, which sold over 25,000 copies. He recounts white-collar crime in Ripoff.- The Corruption that Plagues America.
Steve Allen, the actor who starred in Universal-international's The Benny Goodman Story, is the same man whose poems have appeared in Atlantic Monthly and Saturday Review, and who has had two books of poetry published. Steve Allen, the composer of more than 5,200 songs, is the same man who wrote the popular novel Not All of Your Laughter, Not All of Your Tears.
Steve Allen, the lyricist of such popular songs as "South Rampart Street Parade," "Picnic," "Gravy Waltz," "Mary Hartman-Mary Hartman "and "This Could be the Start of Something Big," also starred on the Broadway stage in The Pink Elephant. Steve Allen, the author of 43 published books, ranging in subject matter from poetry through short stories, humor, autobiography and politics, is also the composer and lyricist of the stage musical Sophie, about the late Sophie Tucker; and, in 1986, he composed the score for the CBS-TV version of Alice in Wonderland.
Steve Allen is the composer of the background score of the MGM film, A Man Called Dagger, and yet the same man who wrote and produced an award-winning TV documentary on organized crime. As Allen's good friend Andy Williams says, "Steve does so many things, he's the only man I know who's listed on every one of the Yellow Pages."
Steve's taste for both high and lowbrow comedy comes naturally-his mother was the popular vaudeville comedienne Belle Montrose. (His father, Billy Allen, Belle's straightman, died before Steve was two.) Though he was raised in and around show business, traveling from city to city, he would usually wind up in Chicago, the home of his mother's Irish-Catholic, lower-middle-class family whose humor Steve describes as "sarcastic, volatile, sometimes disparaging, but very funny." Steve was later to write a semi-autobiographical drama based on reminisces of his early childhood.
The Wake had its world premiere at the Masquers Theatre in Hollywood during the Fall of 1971. In the summer of 1978, The Wake enjoyed a successful run on the Eastern theatre circuit, with Allen himself in one of the starring roles. It garnered the acclaim of both critics and the public, and was nominated by the Los Angeles TV Critics Circle in Best Play category. The Wake was produced, in 1991, by a largely Irish theatrical company in Milwaukee, and in 1992 the play completed a successful run at the Celtic Arts Center in Los Angeles. Steve also adapted the story to novel form, which was published by Doubleday. In his itinerant early years, the one-man creative conglomerate attended no fewer than 18 schools. His college education ended in his sophomore year at Arizona State Teachers' College in Tempe (now ASU) when he took a radio job. Not long thereafter, he joined the infantry in World War II. Back in Phoenix after his discharge, he resumed his work as announcer-writer-pianist-producer at Station KOY, honing and perfecting his pattern of comedy.
Three years in local radio proved valuable training ground. He discovered he could write and deliver funny material, and that funny things seemed to occur to him unbidden and unexpectedly. In 1945, already the father of an infant son and with another soon to come, he took his total savings of $1,000 and headed to Los Angeles to break into big-time radio. After some local station work, Allen teamed with announcer Wendell Noble and managed to get the Mutual Broadcasting Company to air a five-a-week comedy show called Smile Time. After two years on Mutual, Steve landed a half-hour music-talk show on KNX, the Los Angeles CBS radio outlet.
Without fanfare, interference, or encouragement, Steve gradually cut back on the music and increased the talk. He also started inviting Hollywood celebrities to come and plug their latest movies or albums. Within a year, Allen's program expanded to an hour and became the most popular nighttime show in the history of Los Angeles radio, with a standing-room-only studio audience. One evening, when Steve had a 25-minute segment of the program set aside for a Doris Day interview, Doris didn't show up. With the large programming hole to fill, Steve picked up a floor microphone and, for the first time, walked out into the studio audience to ad-lib with some of his unknown visitors. As they say in the biographies of the stars-which is reason enough to say it here-the rest is history.
By 1950 Steve had established his credentials in Los Angeles as an ad-lib comedian with a show described as having an "anything-goes" structure. (It turned out, actually, to be a dress rehearsal for the Tonight show to come.) CBS decided that Steve was ready for the big time-which in 1950 meant television in New York. For the next three years, he starred in a number of early evening and daytime shows, made the guest circuit on such shows as This is Show Business and What's My Line? and for something over a year emceed a weekly series called Songs for Sale.
At a mid point professionally and personally, two things happened which happily created a future picture for Steve Allen. NBC had a title-Tonight-and ninety minutes of air-time. They turned it over to Steve Allen, and he developed the nightly local show that shortly became a national institution. Secondly, Steve met Jayne Meadows.
Jayne, talented and popular actress of motion pictures, television and the Broadway stage, was born in Wu Chang, China, where her parents were Episcopalian missionaries for 14 years. When she came to America at age seven, she spoke Chinese but was just learning to speak fluent English. A woman of many talents and far-ranging knowledge and experience, Jayne had lived on every continent except South America and Australia by the time she met Steve. She had starred in films with Katherine Hepburn, Gregory Peck and David Niven, and on the Broadway stage in Another Love Story, less Them for Me and Spring Again.
Within a year, Jayne and Steve were married. Within the same year, the Tonight show, now on the full NBC-TV network, was the most talked-about program on television, catapulting Steve into the ranks of TV's superstars. But it was the love and security provided by Jayne that gave him the confidence and peace of mind to discover several other Steve Allens-lurking somewhere within the ad-lib wit who headed the Tonight show.
By 1956, Tonight had spawned such future stars as Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme (When asked if he discovered Steve and Eydie, Steve replies, "Yes, in the back seat of a car.") and Andy Williams. Among stars who appeared with Allen early in their careers are Louis Nye, Don Knotts, Tom Poston, the Smothers Brothers, Don Adams, Bill Dana, Jim Nabors, Jackie Vernon, Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, Tim Conway, Lou Rawls, Jackie Mason, Miriam Makeba-the list is almost endless. And some of today's top producers made the big leap with a helpful push from Steve: Dwight Hemion, Bill Harbach, the late Nick Vanoff, Dan Meinick, Leonard Stern, Jeff Harris, Bernie Kukoff, Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, to name a few.
For a number of months in 1956, Steve was doing the 90-minute nightly Tonight show, an hour-long comedy show opposite Ed Sullivan every Sunday night (The Steve Allen Show), and still somehow managed to film The Benny Goodman Story for Universal-international. But the incredible pace was too much even for his seemingly limitless energy. He decided to give up the nightly show and suggested to NBC that either Jack Paar or Ernie Kovacs would serve as an excellent replacement. NBC chose not to follow this advice and, instead, came up with a program called America After Dark. After a few yawnful months during which more and more Americans went to sleep earlier and earlier, the network decided that Steve might have been right after all. Jack Paar and most of the nation agreed. The Sunday night Steve Allen Show continued without interruption through 1960 in a neck-and-neck rating battle with The Ed Sullivan Show, which saw Steve in the lead one week and Sullivan ahead the next. After winning the Peabody Award for the best comedy show of 1960, Steve finally bowed off the network after seven years with NBC. Happily for Steve Allen fans, rest is a word seldom used in the Allen lexicon.
In 1961-62, Steve appeared in a weekly comedy hour on ABC-TV, and the following year returned to his old Tonight format for a Westinghouse-sponsored series. Following almost three years of this, Steve moved back to CBS for three seasons as emcee of I've Got a Secret (Goodson and Todman would also later call on Steve to host the 1972 syndicated version of this program) and, in the summer of 1967, he appeared in a weekly comedy show with wife Jayne for the same network. The CBS show proved to be a warm-up for his later syndicated daily series for Filmways and Golden West Broadcasters, which ran from 1968 through 1972.
"It's ironic," says Steve of these later shows. "In our production meetings we would often hear someone say, 'Let's not do one of our old routines-that's the way they do it on the Carson show'-or 'Dick Cavett did that the other night; let's find another way to do it.'"
"I've even found myself thinking along these lines at times. Yet," says Steve, with a rueful grin, "it was the old Tonight shows which set the format, the tempo, the direction for the talk shows which followed. The only significant change in the basic Tonight format in the last twenty years was made by Jack Paar-he moved in a couch for his guests to sit on." In 1976, Allen scored with another comedy format, Laughback, a weekly 90-minute program reuniting many of his old "gang" in live-on-tape as well as in filmed highlights from past memorable shows. Syndicated to major prime-time markets, Laughback featured such Allen "finds" as Louis Nye, Jonathan Winters, Bill Dana, Don Knotts, Tom Poston, Foster Brooks, Gabe Dell, Jayne Meadows, Skitch Henderson and Tim Conway.
Never one to let a minute go to waste, Allen has been known to work on more than fifty different projects-all at the same time. At last count he had approximately 20 books, short stories, plays, musicals, motion picture properties in the works, not to mention his almost daily output of songs. Among some of his television shows have been ABC-TV's hilarious annual Unofficial Miss Las Vegas Showgirl Beauty Queen Pageant, a spoof of the beauty shows that almost defy spoofing. The first, in 1974, was hailed by Johnny Carson as "the funniest show of the year."
Equally entertaining was the American Academy of Humor TV Special, which Allen helped write, in addition to serving as a performer in the salute to humor. From 1977 to 1981 -- four glorious years-Allen's multi-award winning Meeting of Minds series aired on the PBS Network. The programs, in talk-show format, featured serious discussions with such guests as Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Augustine, Aquinas, Karl Marx, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette and other figures from history. Of this remarkable series, written and hosted by Allen, no less an authority than historian Will Durant said, "Meeting of Minds held our family fascinated. We felt it a conception of originality and courage ... a masterpiece of presentation." Steve and Jayne performed their concert and nightclub show in theaters around the country to critical acclaim.
They also toured, during the mid-70s, in Noel Coward's Tonight at 8.30, garnering such critical praise as: "a highly entertaining show. The multi-talented Allen is marvelous in the two comedy acts.... Allen is unquestionably one of the funniest men in America. His wife is superb in all three, utilizing the full range of her dramatic powers."
In 1989, the Allens performed together at San Francisco's Theatre on the Square, in Love Letters, the play by A.R. Gurney still enjoying a long run in several major U.S. cities. In 1990, they did an encore performance at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills. In 1991 they appeared in the play in Encinitas, and in 1992, in Salt Lake City and aboard they S.S. Sagafjord. And in 1993, they repeat their performance in Allentown, Pennsylvania and LaMirada, California. The future promises a continuing outpouring of creative Allen projects- whether in the form of books, commercial or educational TV, video cassettes, video discs, theater, nightclub, or concert stage performances, lectures, or a combination of all.
Although he is best known as a comedian, Steve Allen's primary gift is for the composition of music. For more than 45 years he has enjoyed a career as a composer, lyricist, conductor, singer and pianist. Honored in the 1985 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records as the most prolific composer of modern times, to date he has written more than 5,000 songs, the list growing weekly, yet he considers himself a musical illiterate because he doesn't read music. Although Steve has more than 40 albums to his credit, his musical training was limited to three years of piano lessons, starting at the age of seven. Despite his lack of training, he continues to create highly melodic numbers at the rate of about 40 per month, and in one recent instance, in the sight of over 200 witnesses in the lobby of a Kalamazoo, Michigan hotel, wrote a total of 400 songs in one day. Many of his songs, strangely enough, have not been created at the piano. They "happen" while he's driving, taking a shower, at work, even asleep. (He dreamed one of his biggest hits: "This Could be the Start of Something Big.")
Among the dozens of prominent artists who have recorded and performed Allen's works are Aretha Franklin, the Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Joe Williams, Andy Williams, Ann Jillian, Perry Como, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Diane Schuur and Mel Torme. Among his hits are such popular standards as "South Rampart Street Parade," "Gravy Waltz," "Pretend You Don't See Her," "Picnic," and "Impossible." He composed the music for his award-winning PBS series, Meeting of Minds, and has written the title lyrics for such films as Picnic, Houseboat, On the Beach, Sleeping Beauty, and Bell, Book and Candle, as well as the musical scores for the MGM film A Man Called Dagger and the NBC-TV documentary film I Remember Illinois.
For the musical theater, he wrote: The Bachelor, which was presented on NBC television in the mid-50s, earning the composer/lyricist a Sylvania Award. Two lasting standards, "This Could Be the Start of Something Big" and "Impossible," emerged from its score. Sophie, based on the life of Sophie Tucker, which premiered on Broadway. Belle Starr, starring Betty Grable, which toured the British Isles. The Al Chemist Show, starring Georgia Brown, which had its premiere in 1980 at The Los Angeles Actors' Theatre. In October 1982, Allen's comedy musical Seymour Glick is Alive but Sick (a satire on Jaques Brel Is Alive and Well opened at the St. Regis Hotel, New York, to critical approval. In 1983, the show played at The Horn in Los Angeles. Also in 1983, Steve wrote the score for a Fantasy Island show. In 1985, he wrote the words and music for Irwin Allen's CBS-TV all-star production of the Lewis Carroll classic Alice in Wonderland. Also in 1985, he was commissioned to compose two pieces of a lasting nature. In honor of Mort Glosser, a retired Gadsden, Alabama High School band director and superintendent of schools, Steve composed "The Mort Glosser March," which he introduced during a day-long event in Gadsden. The march expresses the alumni's gratitude for Glosser's notable work and is now a permanent fixture in the school band repertoire.
The second composition, written at the invitation of the Professional Football Hall of Fame, is "Ten Feet Tall," a march played at the Enshrinees Hall of Fame Weekend in Canton, Ohio, during half-time of a New York Giants and Houston Oilers game. In 1986, Mr. Allen provided twelve songs for an Ann Jillian album and another dozen highly melodic compositions for an album by jazz pianist Paul Smith. In 1992 he did the same for vocalists Frankie Randall and David Silverman. Allen's concert engagements with symphony and pop orchestras consist entirely of his own compositions.
The entertainer is also a jazz pianist. His rewards as a piano player, he has stated, are largely selfish in nature, which is the reason he occasionally plays small jazz clubs around the country, for modest fees, as a way to relax and stir his creative juices. Over the years, he has also been featured in major jazz concerts and in 1993 released, on the Concord label, the highly praised CD "Steve Allen Plays Jazz Tonight."
In 1993 Steve Allen became Abbot of the world famous Friars Club, suceeding Milton Berle, and has dedicated himself to carrying on its esteem traditions.