I’m not sure whether I came in first or second, but I think the show came first. He wasn’t your normal father, because he had a No. I’ve worked with every comedian in the business and they are all totally insane, but your dad was the best.” She said, “You know, your father was so unusual. Do you remember the name Abbe Lane? She was on the bill with my dad as an opening act and I got to know her. Which is apparently rather unusual for comedians. And I think anybody who knew him said that, that he was a truly nice man. I absolutely adored him and I’ve often said he was the nicest man I’ve ever known. Given that Father’s Day is here, what was your relationship with your dad like? He went on to explain that over the next few years Mary was the disciplinarian while he was the “softie,” and that there was a point when Joan was seven that she proclaimed that she hated her mother. I just love her.’ She became very beautiful and I fell in love with my daughter before she was living with us even two days. ‘Isn’t she darling?’ ‘How can you want to adopt a funny-looking thing like that one?’ ‘I can’t help it,’ Mary said. ‘Is this the one you picked?’ I asked Mary. She was bawling so loud and she looked very mad … I couldn’t believe my eyes. Her little legs looked crooked and were wrinkled all over, too, and her eyes were very blue. She was long and skinny and wrinkled all over her face and tiny arms. “Joanie was about two weeks old the first time I saw her. “Mary and I decided to adopt a daughter,” wrote Jack. There’s a lovely passage in Jack and Joan’s joint biography Sunday Nights at Seven: The Jack Benny Story that beautifully captures life between father and daughter.
Between all of this, in 1934, Jack and Mary adopted their daughter, Joan. He also surrounded himself with a great ensemble, including Eddie Anderson as Rochester Van Jones, Jack’s valet and chauffeur Don Wilson as the show’s announcer Gene McNulty as singer Dennis Day (they found a way to work a song into most episodes), Mary Livingstone as Jack’s girlfriend, Phil Harris as himself, a bandleader with an eye out for the ladies and Mel Blanc (the voice of the Looney Tunes characters for decades) in a variety of roles, including the sound of Jack’s car, a Maxwell.Īll of which is to provide some background on Jack that many people might not be aware of. Two years later, Jack signed a five-year deal with MGM for films, but, more importantly, he got his own radio show - The Jack Benny Program - in 1932, where he created the idea of a sitcom within a sitcom portraying to great comic effect a miserly, sometimes cantankerous and self-serving version of himself. He had met, performed with and married Sadie Marks, who would take the stage (and then legal) name Mary Livingstone, and married her in 1927.
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