I had a good act with Red Skelton in the Walkathons and all that sort of thing. It was a tremendous, powerful psychological dramatic show event of salesmanship. And, contrary to what people thought, it was very healthy for all the participants.

Best known as the irascible but lovable Corporal Randolph T. Agarn on the TV sitcom F-Troop, Larry Storch has had a varied and notable career in show business. Breaking in as a stand-up comedian the late 1940s, Storch was a frequent movie and television performer. Voice-over artist and mimic extraordinaire, Storch met Lord Buckley in the late 1940s and was a member of His Lordship’s Royal Court in the 1950s.

He and Red Skelton used to work the Dance Marathons and Tent Shows back in the thirties. I once heard a story that Lord Buckley even swung by a rope from one end of the arena to another with a basket of eggs. He held onto the rope with one arm and, if you can imagine this, threw raw eggs at the audience with the other, swinging back and forth above them.

Business at Leo A. Seltzer’s Walkathons continues to be way above normal and both the Arcadia Gardens and the Coliseum shows are playing to fine audiences. The present standing at Arcadia Gardens is 20 couples and two solos, and the setup here has been strengthened by the acquisition of Dick Buckley as emsee, replacing Red Skelton. Buckley is pleasing the North Side crowds, as is Erskine Tate and his 11-piece orchestra.

Bobby Reed has proved a surprise in the emcee work and is handling broadcasts and doing straights, in addition to working in comedy stints with Dick Buckley.

Dick Buckley, the "spontaneous" comedian brought to Chicago from Hollywood by Leo A. Seltzer, is creating laughter galore for spectators at the walkathon now in progress at the Arcadia.

Following a successful appearance in a comedy movie short and several engagements in California night clubs, Buckley journeyed to Chicago to accept the duties of chief funmaker for Seltzer’s North Side walkathon.

A new feature has made its appearances at Leo A. Seltzer’s Arcadia Walkathon. Each Sunday night hereafter will be known as "Harlem Night," with Erskine Tate and his orchestra providing both the background and the principals for what is promised as the fastest colored revue ever to invade the North Side.

Acts from the major colored cafes and those featuring colored talent will augment Tate and his entertaining organization each Sunday evening as long as the endurance continues.

Coming into the homestretch both of Col. Leo A. Seltzer’s Walkathons here are shattering all records for duration and attendance.

The Arcadia Gardens Event reached a climax Sunday morning at 2 o’clock when a record 3,991 hours was passed. A jammed house was on hand to fittingly celebrate the occasion by contributing to the terrific din which was reminiscent of a New Year’s Eve Party. Seltzer’s talent-studded staff of emcees, including Dick Buckley, Eddie Snyder, Chic Snyder, Rajah Bergman, Frankie Belasco et. Al, led the festivities at a lively pace, while the popular Erskine Tate Orchestra contributed excellent music.

With only three couples and two solos remaining of an original entry of 89 couples, there seems no doubt that the finish is close at hand. However, the closing days are giving the spectators the biggest thrill of all, with each added hour setting a new record.

The Mishkind and Rubin marathon dance derby here is past its 1,700^th hr. with seven couples still plodding the boards. Bob Lee and Dick Buckley joined the show about two weeks ago and are pleasing the fans. The nightly feature is Bob Lee’s human derby and it has proved a good method of eliminating contestants.

Dick Buckley recently had a letter from a friend in Frisco which, according to word from Bob Lee, New York disclosed that he had sent Dick money to join him in a new club venture in Reno. Upon investigation it appears that similar occurrences have several times taken place recently, and in all instances, it has been shown that Dick was in some other part of the country than where money was sent. Someone is using Dick’s name, and promoters are warned to be careful of phony wires, etc.

Followers of Leo A. Seltzer’s Walkathons at the Coliseum and Arcadia Gardens may see their oft-repeated predictions come true when Dick Buckley, Eddie Snyder and "Rajah" Bergman, Seltzer’s aces of comedy and song, leave Chicago Sunday night for screen tests in Hollywood.

Movieland scouts, impressed by their performances at the Walkathons have taken an option on their services.

Bob Lee writes he is doing well in New York City as booker and agent. He recently sold Dick Buckley to the Congress Café for 10 weeks, followed by the Brown Derby, Boston, on an indefinite run. Bob says Walkathon emsees have something on the ball entirely lacking in the average night-club emsee and that Dick is a good bet to go places.

One of the most unique vocal talents ever to hit the jazz scene, Anita O’Day was a star with Stan Kenton’s fabled big bands during the height of the Swing Era. She first crossed paths with Dick Buckley at the Chicago Walkathons during the 1930s. Those wild days are documented in her 1981 autobiography, High Times Hard Times and appear here with the permission of Limelight Editions.

As soon as I saw the ad for the Arcadia Gardens contest, I rushed to sign up. What did I have to lose? Plenty, though I couldn’t foresee it. I goofed, but I can’t say I regret it. Because I met and worked with Dick Buckley, the chief emcee, and Red Skelton, the Midnight Maniac.

Both were highly talented in totally different ways just as they were completely different human beings. Skelton was so success-oriented that nobody interested him unless they were of some immediate use to him. Edna Stillwell, his ex-contestant wife, was a gifted comedy creator who was always busy developing new characters and material for him. Red learned Edna’s routines, performed them over and over until he perfected them and then cherished them. He used them in Walkathons, nightclubs, vaudeville, adapted them for radio and when he got to be a big TV star, he was still doing some of the same bits. He was like a singer who learned the melody and never varied his performance once the song had been mastered. I absorbed a lot watching him, and I don’t feel I’m detracting from his stature when I say that, skilled as his timing and slapstick clowning were, I never felt that he had a natural creative genius.

Skelton wanted great commercial success so badly I think he’d have climbed a ladder of razor blades barefoot to get to the top. Acclaim and money were his gods. If he was also an artist, it was in spite of himself. And I happen to think that as a pantomimist he brought his work to the level of art. But he was a hard person to feel close to. I think that’s why very few of the Walkathoners felt he was one of us.

The self-ordained Lord Buckley, in contrast, viewed all people as princes and princesses, lords and ladies, counts and countesses. The athletically inclined Buckley would climb the high skeletal structure above the contest floor and clown around, half-stoned, with slips and starts that would have spelled curtains for him if he’d made a miscue. You could only conclude that someone was watching over him. For that I was eventually thankful, because Dick Buckley was rhythmical and he took a special interest in my singing.

Unlike Skelton, Buckley performed for the joy of creating. If it hadn’t been a Walkathon, it could have been for a small crowd on a street corner or for his own amusement alone in his room. He was so much his own man, nobody, but nobody could control him. Bread? It was something to spend, a convenience, but not a necessity, not important enough to lead to compromise.

You’ve got to remember that he was a comic at dance marathons. If you’ve seen the picture They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? you know that would drive someone to drink. It was a world where not only did the desperate side of people reveal itself so boldly but the exploiters stripped them of their dignity as well.

Comedian, writer, actor, pianist, composer, and poet, Steve Allen is a cornerstone figure in mid- and late twentieth century American culture and entertainment. Lord Buckley appeared on the Allen-hosted Tonight Show in 1955.

It makes sense that Buckley and Skelton were partners back then. They were different comics who shared a certain dynamic and spirit. Part of it was that the audio systems in those days, if they existed, were so lousy that a Wally Cox couldn’t have made it in the business at all, or even a Bob Newhart. Those comics couldn’t work until there were good PA systems. But the older guys could dominate an audience because they had to.

Jim Burns is a British writer whose notes on Lord Buckley appeared in various publications. His witness in this book is excerpted from "The Hip Messiah," his August 12, 1963 article in The Guardian and his September 1970 article in Jazz Monthly.

According to some reports Buckley was active in nightclubs as long ago as the Twenties, a not at all doubtful suggestion when one considers that poetry readings and similar activities were not unknown in Chicago clubs during that period. There was a flourishing bohemian café life—and it is reasonable to assume that someone like Buckley would have a ready-made audience available for this kind of "in" humor. I don’t want to get involved in any long and detailed discussion of bohemian life in Chicago but it is worth recommending Kenneth Rexroth’s An Autobiographical Novel for its fascinating description of activities there. It isn’t irrelevant to mention this book because it’s reasonable to presume that Buckley’s social attitudes were more than probably colored by his experiences early in his life. Buckley doesn’t seem to have been obviously active during the thirties and I would guess that the break-up of the free-and-easy radical bohemianism of the Twenties left him high and dry and without an audience. To generalize, one can see a whole tradition of American dissent falling apart around 1930 (Rexroth uses the Sacco-Venzetti execution of 1927 as a convenient marker), with the result that Communist domination during the Thirties meant that much social comment was strait-jacketed to the partyline. Buckley clearly would not fit into this context.

Charles Tacot was Lord Buckley’s road manager for a stint in the 1950s. For many years his liner notes to the famed Elektra recording The Best of Lord Buckley provided virtually the only information available on His Lordship.

The "blast ’em and insult ’em" school of comedians so popular today was actually started by Buckley when, back in the twenties, he became the pet of one of the big Chicago gangsters, who set him up in a nightclub because he liked the way Dick put on the suckers. Of course, Dick had the protection of the gangland element during that period, and possibly he never got over it. He carried a bit of it with him always. He never really expected retribution to come or be paid. Dick always figured he would get away with it, and he usually did. It seemed predestined that Dick could never really become successful during his lifetime. He used up all his luck just staying alive.

Buckley’s life was exactly like his act. In other words he lived his life in bits. When he would do something it had a beginning, a middle and a climactic end. To him, performing in front of you or me was just as important as it was in front of a thousand people. So he lived his life that way.

When he was working in Chicago during the thirties, Al Capone’s guy came up to him and said, "Boss thinks your great. What do you want?"

Buckley says, "I want a club—Chez Buckley."

This is the middle of Prohibition but the guy says, "Okay, ya got it."

So Buckley supervises the doing of this club and they open it up. On opening night he realizes he doesn’t have any material because he’s a winger. He wings it. And he finally comes out on the dance floor and says, "My Lords and Ladies of the Royal Court, I must beg your help here."

And he goes over to each gangster’s wife and takes their mink coat. "May I? I’ll bring it right back." He piles them all on the fuckin’ dance floor and pulls out a can of lighter fluid and he squirts it on the coats. Nobody believes it, of course. They don’t know what he’s going to do while he says: "When is flame not a flame either in the heat or in the cold? And when is what you see not what you see but what you think you see?" He’s doing all this double-talk and making them all sit still. After a few minutes the lighter fluid starts to evaporate and becomes flammable, he whips out a match, lights it, says, "Here it is!" He hits the pile of coats with it and: "Pow!"

First it has a sort of blue flame about a foot off the furs and then it settles down in there and starts to burn. The flame gets a little yellowish and it becomes obvious that it really is burning and these chicks are sitting around watching their fur coats go up in smoke.

Buckley at this point is standing at the bar next to the stage. He used to do a jump act where he would jump four feet right up in the air. Straight up. He jumped straight up: Boom!—onto the bar and starts tap dancing down the bar as these fuckin’ furs all burnt. And he gets to the end of the bar and the bartender says, "Jesus, I don’t know if I want to be around here when Al stops laughing." Because Al Capone was laughing at that moment.

Buckley said, "You know man, you’re right."

And he jumped down, ran out of the front door and caught the next train to New York.

Well, it turned out that Al Capone bought all the coats and thought it was wonderful. He knew the guy. What the fuck were a bunch of fur coats to him. It was the funniest thing that ever happened. Buckley hadn’t waited and that was the end of Chez Buckley.

But everything in his life was that way. He would blow anything for a laugh. He was a man who played with his life that way. It was brilliant and unrecognized except for show business people.

The late Adam Keefe was one of the hot young stand-up comics of the late 1950s and early ’60s. Appearing frequently at various New York City venues and as a regular on The Ed Sullivan Show, Keefe was an orbiting member of Lord Buckley’s floating Royal Court.

One of the great stories I heard was when Buckley was working a club in Chicago called the Suzy Q. He hired an open-backed hearse and was lying in an open coffin in the back of the hearse. There was a big sign on the side of the hearse that said: "The Body Comes Alive at the Suzy Q" and he’s lying there in the coffin smoking a joint riding around Chicago.

He did all these acrobatic things like jumping over tables. He was an ad-libber. I heard that he once got run out of a club because he pulled his thing out and slapped it on a table. He got into porn a little bit maybe. I think that kind of thing stopped him from being really big.

I first met Lord Buckley in the late 1940s or 1950. Our meeting took place in the Essex House in New York and he did something that totally freaked me out. We were in the bedroom and the window was wide open and he leaped across the beds and it looked like he was headed right out the window. But he landed in the space between the bed and the window. He was always looking to shock you. I wouldn’t say he was an acrobat but he had very good physical abilities. He was a very strong guy.

Buckley sat down in the middle of the floor and everybody’s out there laughing, smoking, nobody paying any attention, and he’d just stare each person down. And finally they all got quiet. And then he simply started swearing at each person. "You son-of-a-bitch. You bastard!" It got quieter. Couple of snickers here and there. Anyway, he went around the room like that and then he said, "Now Junior will jump through that hole in the door. Give me a drum roll!" So I gave them a drum roll, and, sure enough, Junior jumps headfirst through this little porthole that led to the kitchen. And we hear this crashing and these horrible noises. Then everybody’s laughing and Buckley and his entourage walk out. That was the end of their act.

I became a protegee of Buckley.

The Planet Mars, at 1117 Wilson Avenue, had a regular show, as regular as any show laid out and emceed by Dick Buckley could be, because Dick was an anarchist at heart. If, five minutes on stage, he decided the audience was square, he’d boom out, "That’s all, folks. The show has been concluded."

Dick was always in trouble because he refused to play Casper Milquetoast with the bosses. The owners could work him over, give him his lumps, but he still ran things his way. The only way they could have controlled Dick would have been to kill him. A couple of them wanted to, but they weren’t about to do that because wherever he played, he did business.

At the Planet Mars, Dick’s acrobatics were even wilder than they had been at the Arcadia Gardens. The stage was slightly elevated and tables were scattered around the room. Dick would be up there on stage sipping gin, smoking tea or popping pills as casually as if he were in the privacy of his home. In the midst of a low-key bit, he’d let out a war whoop, sprint to the edge of the stage and leap into space, barely clearing the heads of the customers with his arms and legs as he sailed beyond the tables.

There were all kinds of wild scenes at the Planet Mars which made me feel if I could keep my cool there, I could perform anywhere.

The cast never knew what to expect. Once, when everything was quiet, the audience heard a shriek. Suddenly, Al Lyons dashed through the crowd, wearing only a red cap with a tassel and a pair of shorts. A couple of seconds later, Dick sprinted after him with a long loaf of Italian bread sticking out of his pants like a huge penis. Seconds later, Dick’s Great Dane, with a pet monkey on its back, bounded out, pursuing Dick. It was just an Olsen and Johnson kind of thing, but naturally, with Dick, it had to have a sexual connotation.

Dick wanted nothing written down. Even the most far-out comics had routines at that time. I remember Bill Dohler, who played alto sax and loved jazz, telling Dick how much he admired his comic improvising. "But everybody has a certain underlying form to work from," he said. "Even the great masters have to have that."

"Not I," Dick announced, drawing himself to his full six feet two inches. Dick was the forefather of Professor Irwin Corey, Lenny Bruce and such Chicago improvisers as Mike Nichols, Elaine May and Shelley Berman who made it big twenty-five years later.

I admired Dick because he was, like, the action. And my aim had always been to be where it was. I suppose to most people these were just dull little taverns, but I came from a very dumb, one-room-and-kitchenette scene so the taverns seemed glamorous to me.

On the other hand, Dick always lived in spacious quarters supplied to him by a real estate man who was a Buckley fan. He got Dick a series of apartments where all Dick’s friends were welcome at any time of the day or night. If, temporarily, you didn’t have a pad, you could sleep there as long as floor space remained. What’s more, Dick supplied all the food and other goodies to keep the party going from morning to night.

His first wife, as far I know, was Angel Rice, but she soon cut out after he took up with a tall blonde with a lovely complexion whom everybody called Peaches. Now Dick and Peaches generally received in the nude. Friends were free to bring their friends, too. Often they’d bring along somebody who was semi-legitimate, only to be met at the door by a stark naked Peaches. I knew her quite well, but I don’t believe I ever saw her except in the buff.

Guests were also invited to leave their clothing by the door. But those of us who didn’t want to shed our clothes didn’t have to. Whatever way you chose to play, it was all right with Dick. That was your game.

Eventually, he elevated himself to Lord Buckley, but at this time he was playing a Greek king or a Roman emperor and he modeled life in the apartment on their customs. For instance, when he’d be lying on the couch, he’d signal Peaches, who’d immediately fetch a bowl which he’d urinate into.

One thing I want to make clear. This was no sex orgy. Dick just felt it created a free atmosphere in which he’d tell stories, play good music, whatever.

Those of us who got to know Buckley found that nothing was sacred where his perverted sense of humor was concerned. He was truly the first of the insult-type comics—before people like Don Rickles and the late Lenny Bruce—although I think Buckley’s subjects were often too strong for audiences then.

A little truth. Truth is strange to the ears. Even wild truth: things that happen that supercede and carry on beyond the parallel of practiced credulity.

© 2002, The WELL
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