Amos ‘n’ Andy Still Struggle for Script Ideas

The Milwaukee Journal – Jul 1, 1941

Amos ‘n’ Andy Still Struggle for Script Ideas

TWO gentlemen from the west were entertaining H. Allen Smith of the New York World Telegram in an elegant suite of the elegant Savoy Plaza.

One of the two, wearing a tan bathrobe over his shorts, was on a chair next to a window and was squinting into a kaleidoscope—not one of your little cigar size Kaleidoscopes, but a kaleidoscope as big as a virgin bologna. As he turned the thing slowly in his hand he kept saying:

“Lawd, lawd! Is that purty! Purtiest thing I ever saw in my life.”

The other gentleman from the west—a handsome fellow in expensive togs- sat on the edge of his chair and occasionally reached out hesitantly for the kaleidoscope.

“C’mon, now,” he said. “Lemmy look a while. It’s my turn gold urn it, and you had it long enough.”

The names of these two are Amos ‘n’Andy.

On the desk stood a portable typewriter and in it a script sandwich composed of two sheets of onionskin paper and one sheet of carbon paper. On the paper were the following words:

May 6, 1941, Amos ‘n’ Andy. Written in the Savoy Plaza hotel. Episode No. 3621.

That was all. The script for the evening broadcast was yet to be written. The boys had achieved stalemate.

“Usually,” said-Freeman Gosden, who is Amos, “usually we knock it off in an hour flat. But sometimes it takes as long as four hours.”

“Sometimes,” put in Charles (Andy) Correll, “we get this much written at the top, then we stop, and we pace the floor and yammer at each other. Finally we decide to give it up to abandon radio and everything else, as of that moment. We get the feeling that we’re through, washed up. Then one or the other of us looks down at the typewriter and sees that line ‘Episode No. 3621.’ We decide that we’ve done it 3,620 times, so we ought to be able to do it just once more to make it 3,621. And we knock it out.”

Amos ‘n’ Andy came to town to be guests on the Fred Allen show. They now live in California where Amos is a friend for tennis and Andy spends his spare time on the golf course.

As always on a trip to New York, they have been to Harlem. They went up together in a taxi and got out at a street corner. Nobody paid them any mind. They separated. Amos wandered off in one direction and Andy is another. In half an hour they were back together again.

They didn’t talk about what they had seen or what they had heard. They weren’t looking for lines, or even specific characters. They just like to wander around in Harlem and absorb atmosphere.

“We couldn’t tell you it is we get on those visits,” said Gosden. “People are always trying to take us to Harlem night clubs, but we never go. You can’t get anything but a lot of ear splitting music on those places. We always separate when we go wandering because when we’re together sometimes they recognize us and start following us. Otherwise no one ever pays us a bit of mind.”

They talked about the 8 or 10 characters who have remained active during the dozen years they have been on the air. They talked of Brother Crawford, the henpecked one, and of Henry Van Porter of Harlem society and of the Kingfish the most conniving creature in radio.

“We used to know Huey Long,” said Gosden, “and I’ll tell you how he got the name of Kingfish. Our Kingfish, you know, is always outsmarting himself in his double dealing. Well, Huey, before he was governor, put over some kind of a bond issue and he didn’t want the governor who was then in office to have any say about it. So there was a provision in the law which said the governor couldn’t touch that bond issue.

“Well, the next thing you know Huey has been elected governor. He calls a meeting and during the meeting he stands up and says, ‘Now we’ll take up the matter of this bond issue.’ One of his opponents challenged him, and reminded him that the governor couldn’t mess with that bond issue.

“So Huey raps twice with the gavel and says, ‘Listen, you bums, I’m the Kingfish of this lodge and what I say goes.’ And he took up the matter of the bond issue. After that he was always known as the Kingfish.”

Their program has gone on and on, the boys said, probably because they take vast precautions against ever offending any listener.

“Nobody ever drinks in our scripts,” said Gosden.

“And nobody ever gambles,” put in Correll.

“Just imagine,” said Gosden, “how much fun we could have the laughs we could get if we could have the boys lickered up and shooting craps. But we can’t do it, can we, Charlie?”

Andy Brown didn’t answer. He was squinting into that kaleidoscope again and muttering:

“Yass, suh! Certainly is purty!”