I picked up series sets of one-season comedies When Things Were Rotten (1975), a Mel Brooks takeoff on the Robin Hood legend, and 1966's It's About Time, created by Sherwood Schwartz and nothing more than a reworking of his awful Gilligan's Island.
And since 1953's The Eddie Cantor Story isn't available through a legitimate DVD release, I picked up a bootleg instead. The picture quality isn't that bad, and the movie isn't as terrible as some have written. It was obviously modeled on the hugely successful The Jolson Story and even had the real Eddie Cantor sing the songs star Keefe Brasselle lip synched. Cantor and his wife Ida were at the beginning and end of the movie to add some further prestige to the flick. However, the reviews were never very good, and Brasselle was a bit too tall to play the diminutive Cantor. But he wasn't too bad. However, Brasselle pretty much peaked as an actor in this role. I would go further and say that despite his good looks, Brasselle was a failure in everything he did, kind of like our previous president.
Brasselle flopped as an actor, and, as you can see from this YouTube clip, he couldn't sing for shit, much less do impressions:
But Brasselle DID have some powerful connections, including a longstanding friendship with CBS president James T. Aubrey, who ran the network from 1959-1965, until he was dumped in part because of his association with Brasselle. He was also rumored to have connections to the mob. Keefe tried his hand at a summer variety series in 1963, which flopped, of course, and then he became a big shot television producer with three shows placed on the 1964-1965 schedule. There were no pilots for these series but simply scripts. It didn't matter. Brasselle finally hit the big time or so he thought:
"I am the most confident man in the world," announced Keefe Brasselle, the arrogant young assistant to the president of the CBS television network, James T. Aubrey. "I have three shows on the air this year. Next year, I'll have five. None of them will fail."*
But fail all three shows did: The Baileys of Balboa, The Reporter, and The Cara Williams Show. None lasted more than a single season. As mentioned above, questions were raised about Aubrey's improprieties and connections with Brasselle, and Aubrey was sacked early in 1965. Aubrey, though, bounced back as head of MGM and later in independent production.
And what became of Brasselle? He wrote a thinly disguised novel about CBS, The CanniBalS, which flopped, and he died in 1981 in obscurity.
When I think about it, there are entertainers like Britney Spears, who has utterly no talent whatsoever but is filthy rich and successful, and there are people like Keefe Brasselle, who also had no talent, but ended up a failure in all of his various careers.
Life certainly isn't fair.
Coincidentally, Brasselle would have been 86 today.
More about Aubrey can be found here and in the September 8, 1968, issue of New York magazine. Readers should scroll to pages 54-59. A review of Brasselle's novel follows the article.
*--Excerpt from 1980's The Worst TV Shows Ever by Bart Andrews and Brad Dunning, page 5.
No comments:
Post a Comment