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The Great Gildersleeve’s Big Break: Harold Peary's Unforgettable Laugh





Sunday, March 21, 1943
THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL – SCREEN and RADIO              11


The Great Gildersleeve’s Big Break
If Stage Hadn’t Been Too Wide, Hal Peary
Mighty Not Have Jumped to Stardom
By J. D. Spiro

*Picture on page 1
THE HON. Throckmorton P.Gildersleeve, water commissioner of the widely known but mythical town of Summerfield, is today a considerable sort of person in the life of this nation. When at the appointed hour each Sunday (5:30 p. m. our time) he steps to the microphone in NBC’s Hollywood studios some 28,000,000 individuals over the country cock their ears toward their radio sets and eagerly wait to learn what the Great Gildersleeve is about to do next.
Yet it was only yesterday, as time goes, that the  Great Gildersleeve  was but an unsung stooge for Fibber McGee and Molly. In truth, until one night in radio New Year’s week of 1939, the  Great Gildersleeve  was just a lot of other fellows of diverse nationalities, including the Chinese. Then on that night, at the Palace theater in Chicago, suddenly and wholly unexpectedly he headed straight for radio, as well as movie, stardom.
Had the stage at the Palace, formerly the Orpheum of the good old vaudeville days, not been a few feet wider than most events now a part of radio history would never have occurred, and the world, unconscious of its loss, might never have heard of  Throckmorton P.Gildersleeve  at all. This we have straight from Gildersleeve’s alter ego, the dark, rotund, smiling Californian professionally known as Harold Peary.
Villain Laugh Makes Star of Stooge
As Peary tells the story, after some years at NBC in San Francisco he was shifted in 1935 to that network’s Chicago studios as a staff character actor, arriving there the week in which  Fibber McGee and Molly  first went on the network. Within two years he became a part of the  Fibber McGee and Mollly show , doing a wide variety of roles. At one moment, for instance, he was a Chinese restaurant keeper, Gooey Fooey, at another the panicky Portuguese piccolo player; at still another Mr. Bank Night, the local movie exhibitor.
That sort of thing continued until New Year’s week four years ago. In that week Fibber and Molly were booked for personal appearances at the Palace and Peary went with them to do his accustoined stooging. At the climax of this sales effort, McGee would snap his own suspenders, his pants would start to come down and Peary would exit laughing.
“As I started off the stage that first night,” Peary recalls, “I suddenly became aware that I had farther to go than I had thought, for the stage was extra wide, and I realized I had to do something to cover those last few feet of my exit. Now in my early days at NBC in San Francisco, I’d played a burlesque villain, one of those hokum stock characters of old-time melodrama with a curly black mustache, a leer and a cornful, hollow, mocking laugh. As I moved toward the wings that laugh just popped out of the forgotten past.”
It all happened too quickly for Peary to know just how. But there was no uncertainty about the effect. The Palace rocked with applause.
“It looks,” said Peary to himself that moment, “as if we had something there.”
Those responsible for the  Fibber McGee and Molly  show were no less discerning Don Quinn, the able script writer, promptly went to work and by the following Tuesday he had sketched out a pompous character with the Peary laugh modified just, but and had named him  Throckmorton P.Gildersleeve . Peary then dropped all his other characterizations.
At first Gildersleeve was just a foil for McGee, often outlandish, sometimes obnoxious. Gradually, however, he became dramatically more honest and sympathetic and he soon had a growing fan following. Meanwhile the Fibber and Molly company moved out to Hollywood. Thus, definitely on the rise, Peary came back to the California he had left four year before. By 1841 Gildersleeve had become so important as a radio figure that NBC decided to offer him as a summer substitute for McGee and Molly. The latter’s sponsor however, after auditioning him and Ransom Sherman, picked Sherman.
But news of Peary’s audition had gotten around, and on Aug. 28, 1941, for another advertiser. Peary began the series of little comedy-dramas that have now lifted him to eleventh place among half hour air shows, with a Crossley survey rating of 25.7. He is said to be the first radio actor thus to leap from stooge to stardom.
Stage, Silent Films Part of Past
A Portuguese American whose real name is Harrold Jose Pereira De Faria, the creator of Gildersleeve was born 37 years ago on his father’s dairy farm at San Leandro, Calif., near the east side of San Francisco bay. His mother early taught him to sing and by age 13 he was a boy baritone in a juvenile troupe. He also had a talent for mimicry and soon he interrupted his schooling at St. Mary’s convent near San Leandro to travel the Orpheum circuit with Sylvia Breamer, whose name once meant something in silent films. After quitting this to go to St. Mary’s college near his home, he was again lured by the stage and joined Berton Churchill in “Alias the Deacon” at a San Francisco theater.
Later young Harrold, now known as Pearry, did a lot of Pacific coast trouping of one kind and another, during which he even tried the silent film, first with Bobby Vernon, then in a small way with De Mille in “King of Kings.”
All His Weight for ‘Gildy”
Meanwhile NBC had spread its first radio network with Pacific coast headquarters in San Francisco, so Peary went back there in 1928 and landed a job as a staff actor and singer at the handsome…ure of $9 a show. His forte was dialect roles. At one time in the seven years he spent at NBC in San Francisco he had parts in 17 different shows calling for dialects, and he did seven or eight roles in one show.
When Peary returned to Hollywood from Chicago in 1939 the movies again beckoned. He did a film with Bob Burns. “Comin’ Round the Mountain,” another “Country Fair.” But not until he put the  Great Gildersleeve  on the screen did he begin to catch on substantially in pictures began when RKO-Radio starred Fibber and Molly with Edgar Bergen in “Look Who’s Laughing,” then in “Here We Go Again,” Gildersleeve had considerable roles in each.
Now Peary is top man in a series of photoplays the first of which, “ Great Gildersleeve ” RKO. Radio fiinshed last fall, and the second of which, “Dildersleeve’s Bad Day,” is now before the cameras. With a three year contract, calling for a minimum of two films a year. Peary will do his third soon. It will be “Gildersleeve’s Ghost”
These little comedy-dramas seek to put on film the essential character of the air show and they include most of the radio figures though these in some cases, are not played by the same actors. Thus in “Gildersleeve’s Bad Day, Birdie (Lillian Randolph) and Mr. Peavey (Richard Le Grand) are uncharged, but three others are done by players not associated with broadcasts.
Peary is not one of the many actors who take all the credit for success to themselves. He spreads it around handsomely and dwells on the merits of the two writers who turn out his weekly broadcast John Whedon, formerly of the New Yorker magazine, and Sam Moore. Their problem each week is to get Gildersleeve in and out of a dilemma in 30 minutes while … keeping him strictly  in character pompous and selfassured: with ambitions far outrunning his abilities  withal, friendly and likable.
Amiability is one of Peary’s own outstanding traits. To all around the NBC studios and on the RKO-Radio lot he is “Hal.” He usually appears with a cigar stuck between his teeth and a smile for everyone though it as said he can get hopping mad at times and explode with loud…
Of medium height, feet 9 inches, with black hair and brown eye, he now runs heavily to avoirdupois. In the past four year. He says, he has put on 50 pounds for a current total of 235.
“I did it all for Gildersleeve,” he explains. “He should be a comfortably fat man especially on the screen.”
When Peary goes home at night it is to a wife with whom he has lived for the past 14 years. She is the former Betty Jourdaine , who was a dancer in the stage when Peary was trouping around the wet in his twenties. They met while he was on tour in Arizona where she went from San Francisco to join the company. Today they live on a little walnut ranch in the San Fernando valley near Encino, a favorite spot of movie and radio actors, of which Fibber McGee is mayor.
There Peary in his currently infrequent spare moments relaxes with his phonograph records of which he has many, or fusses around with a collection of old and rare firearms, or maybe does a bit of writing. Once he used to frequent the police courts in Oakland and San Francisco for material out of which he fashioned real life crime stories for detective magazines.
This Star Doesn’t Neglect Mail.
For the last five years he has been collecting information on book on which he is working which probably will be the first to give full recognition to the achievements of Portuguese-Americans in the field of American art and the theater.
“Most people in this country,” says Peary, “think we Portuguese are just a lot of fishermen.”
With all his activities Peary does not neglect his fan mail, which now has grown to sizable volume. He is especially interested in letters from the boys in service and he derived no little satisfaction from on he received not so long ago. It was from a soldier, who wrote: “I get a bigger kick out of that laugh of yours than anything I know. It always makes me laugh, too. It sure would be swell to be able to hear it whenever I felt low.”
Today that soldier can turn on the famous Gildersleeve laugh whenever he likes, for Peary made a special recording of it and sent it to him overseas.
Gildersleeve’s neighbors and relatives help him get a lot of those Sunday laughs. Meet (left) Mr. Peavey, the druggist of “I wouldn’t say that” fame. Then there are Gildy’s nephew Leroy(played by Walter Tetley) and Niece Marjorie (Lurene Tuttle), while at the right the great man himself (with mustache) squares off with his rival in love, the hated Judge Hooker (Earle Ross)      

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