[78-L] Soupy Sales: One of jazz's best friends is gone

[Michael Biel]

Soupy died on the eve of the Friends of Old Time Radio convention, and I
opened my broadcast of the event with Soupy's obit.  He had made 3 or 4
appearances there in recent years, and was well remembered this weekend
by some of his WNEW-TV co-conspirators such as Chuck McCann.  Sandy
Becker's widow Cherie showed some X-rated outtakes of her hubby from
that same station.  Soupy had been very ill in recent years and suffered
from an illness which left his body in the way that he looked and
sounded like he had suffered a serious stroke, but his mind was
completely undamaged so it must have been frustrating to him.  But he
loved being at FOTR and every once in a while was able to put in a
zinger to top his old-time buddies.   The video they showed to end the
tribute was not the usual -- we've seen all those before -- but rather
his Ed Sullivan Show performance of "Do the Mouse" where he pranced
around Ed's audience and coincidentally danced with and met for the
first time his future wife, who remained devoted to him.  That simple
video, no jokes and no pies, was strangely moving to me, and it took
about 15 seconds before I was able to talk after it, and I don't think I
was fully fluent till several minutes after.   There is a picture of a
tribute that has been placed at Soupy's star: a pie.   
http://www.newsfromme.com/images11/soupystar.jpg   The pie appears to be
in a tin, something that Soupy did not allow.  His colleagues told us
that his theory was that the person's face must be immediately visible
as the pie hits and falls away, something that a tin will inhibit.  So a
pie throwing hint: filling and crust only.  


Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com   


From: David Lennick <dlennick at sympatico.ca>
> I knew he was a jazz fan the time he referred to a coat he'd bought in Chicago 
as an Illinois Jacket.

Some fun stuff here:

http://www.tvparty.com/soupy.html

You can start sending those little green pieces of paper to me instead.

dl

Cary Ginell wrote:
> Like every other kid of the '60s, I watched Soupy Sales every day but didn't realize how much he loved jazz until I started writing my book on Terry Gibbs. Soupy would invite famous jazz musicians to appear as literal "walk-ons" on his show. Soupy might be doing a skit, when, without warning, Thelonious Monk would just saunter across the stage in back of him, minding his own business. Five minutes later, he'd walk back across the other way. Click on the Youtube link at the bottom of the article for a rare TV appearance by Clifford Brown on the '50s version of his show. 
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> Cary Ginell
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> October 23, 2009
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> Soupy Sales, Slapstick Comedian, Dies at 83
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> By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
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> Soupy Sales, whose zany television routines turned the smashing of a pie to the face into a madcap art form, died Thursday night. He was 83.
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> Mr. Sales’s former manager, Dave Usher, said the entertainer died in a hospice in New York City after suffering from multiple health problems.
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> Cavorting with his puppet sidekicks White Fang, Black Tooth, Pookie the Lion and Hobart and Reba, the heads in the pot-bellied stove, transforming himself into the private detective Philo Kvetch, and playing host to the ever-present “nut at the door,” Soupy Sales became a television favorite of youngsters and an anarchic comedy hero for teenagers and college students.
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> Clad in a top hat, sweater and bow tie, shuffling through his Mouse dance, he reached his slapstick heyday in the mid-1960s on “The Soupy Sales Show,” a widely syndicated program based at WNEW-TV in New York.
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> Some 20,000 pies were hurled at Soupy Sales or at visitors to his TV shows in the 1950s and ’60s, by his own count. The victims included Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis, all of whom turned up just for the honor of being creamed.
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> His memoir “Soupy Sez!” (M. Evans, 2001), written with Charles Salzberg, supplied the precise ingredients for successful pie-throwing: “You can use whipped cream, egg whites or shaving cream, but shaving cream is much better because it doesn’t spoil. And no tin plates. The secret is you just can’t push it and shove it in somebody’s face. It has to be done with a pie that has a lot of crust so that it breaks up into a thousand pieces when it hits you.”
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> But the key to his comedy went beyond the smashing of a pie.
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> “Our shows were not actually written, but they were precisely thought out,” he explained in his memoir. “But the greatest thing about the show, and I think the reason for its success, was that it seemed undisciplined. The more you can make a performance seem spontaneous, the better an entertainer you are.”
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> For all the staged mayhem, the truly unpredictable did occur. “I remember one time we were working with Pookie at the window,” Mr. Sales recalled. “He was doing a bit where he was breaking eggs and one of the eggs turned out to be rotten. My God, the smell was terrible! And I’m sure, watching us at home, everyone knew there was something wrong from the look on our faces.”
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> Soupy Sales was born Milton Supman in Franklinton, N.C., where his parents, Irving and Sadie Supman, owned a dry goods store. His last name was pronounced “Soupman” by neighbors, so he called himself Soupy as a youngster.
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> Drawing on the physical comedy of the Marx Brothers and Harry Ritz, he entered show business after graduating from Marshall College in Huntington, W.Va. Working as a teenage dance-show host and D. J. on television and radio, he appeared on stations in Cincinnati and Cleveland, then began “Lunch With Soupy” in 1953 on WXYZ-TV in Detroit. He took the name Soupy Sales in part from the old-time comic actor Chic Sale. After appearing on local TV in Los Angeles and on the ABC-TV network, he made his debut on WNEW in the fall of 1964.
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> Then came an infamous moment. On New Year’s Day 1965, Soupy Sales asked youngsters to go through their parents’ clothing and send him little green pieces of paper with pictures of men with beards. He later reported receiving only a few dollar bills and said he donated them to charity, but Metromedia, the station’s owner, suspended him briefly after a viewer complained to the Federal Communications Commission that he was encouraging children to steal.
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> That stunt only heightened Mr. Sales’s appeal to young people as a tweaker of authority, and when he headlined a rock ’n’ roll show at the New York Paramount the following Easter, perhaps 3,000 teenagers were snaking through Times Square hoping for seats at the morning performance. “He’s great, he’s a nut like us,” a 13-year-old boy told The New York Times.
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> Mr. Sales was later a longtime panelist on TV’s “What’s My Line” and he was host for a variety talk show on WNBC Radio in the 1980s.
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> Mr. Sales is survived by his wife, Trudy, and his two sons, Tony and Hunt.
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> For all the shenanigans, one episode remained etched in the Soupy Sales pie-throwing hall of fame. “One of my younger fans made the mistake of heaving a frozen pie at me before it defrosted,” he once wrote in The New York Journal-American. “It caught me in the neck and I dropped like a pile of bricks.”
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> Soupy was a big Jazz fan too:
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> Clifford Brown On The Soupy Sales Show
> http://video.google.com/videosearch?client=safari&rls=en&q=Clifford+Brown+%2B+Soupy+Sales&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=-L3hSoTNLIigsgOdmrm5Aw&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBUQqwQwAA#
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