MARTY ALLEN
Marty Allen was very funny and very funny-looking. Born Morton David Alpern in Pittsburgh on March 23, 1922 the frizzy-haired, bug-eyed comedian/actor/TV game-show personality/dancer attributed his staying power (he performed in one venue or another well into his nineties) to being in prime physical condition.
“I work out every day,” he told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in a 2009 interview. “Just yesterday I was on the treadmill for an hour. Then some idiot turned it on.” Bada-bing. During a 2016 performance in Mill Valley, California Allen proudly quipped, “Ninety-four years old, and I’ve still got it! But nobody wants it.” Quite to the contrary, during a nearly seventy-year stage career the heyday of which came in a far simpler time, everybody wanted it. Marty Allen together or Marty Allen solo was a headliner.
Allen the clown and Steve Rossi, the crooner forged a professional partnership which made them one of the most successful comedy teams of the 1960s. Allen & Rossi were together for more than fifteen years. Their act which typically opened with Allen’s signature greeting, “Hello dere!” was hardly sophisticated, but nonetheless effective. The routines and gags were vaudevillian in nature — and sometimes groan-worthy — usually employing the interview format. The handsome Rossi asked the questions of the typically befuddled and lost but lovable Allen. In one of their more renowned stage exchanges Allen was a punch-drunk boxer queried by Rossi who matter-of-factly inquired, “Would you say you’re the best fighter in the country?” Allen’s hazy response? “Yeah, but in the city they murder me.” “What’s the first thing you think of when you enter the ring?” “How to get out.” “How many fights have you had?” “Hundreds.” “How many did you lose?” “Hundreds.” “How do you explain that?” “You can’t win ’em all.” Silly, foolish, witless and imbecilic but it worked due to the partners’ personalities and chemistry.
Rossi’s suavity, charm and poise as the duo’s straight man was a perfect lead-in to the irrepressible foil Allen’s childlike and wide-eyed mix of innocence and insanity. Soon after teaming up in the late 1950s, Allen & Rossi became a popular act and a familiar presence in the country’s top nightclubs and on television variety shows. The coup de grace and undeniable proof that they had made it came in a couple of their many appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” an iconic Sunday night event which Allen insisted booked the two of them more than Ed Sullivan himself. Handed the unenviable task of following the Beatles on two separate occasions, the two did the best they could. In February 1964 Allen performed a frenetic dance routine while wearing a genuinely authentic Beatles wig. (He confided in an interview with the Vallejo-Times Herald (CA.) in 2012 that he was a bit flummoxed prior to being introduced. “I kept thinking, ‘What could I possibly say?’ “We walked out, I looked at the camera, said, ‘Hello dere, kids. I’m Ringo’s mother,’ and the kids started screaming.” The grasping at straws remark was seen by 73 million viewers and helped secure Allen & Rossi’s position as a top comedy act not to mention considerably boosting their pay). And in a September 1965 appearance the mercurial Allen ran up and down the theater aisles while the unflappable Rossi belted out his rendition of “She Loves You,” substituting “We Love You, yeah, yeah, yeah” while reassuringly playing to the audience of hysterical teenage girls. It worked.
Comedic history has offered us scores of more famous and accomplished teams. Laurel and Hardy. Abbott and Costello. Amos and Andy. The Marx Brothers. The Three Stooges. Hope & Crosby. Martin & Lewis. Lucy and Ethel. Lemmon and Matthau. Cheech & Chong. Stiller & Meara. Tim Conway and Harvey Korman. Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. Of more recent vintage were Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Or Chris Farley and David Spade. Even Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. Across the pond Monty Python and Simon Pegg & Nick Frost earned their stripes. All, including Allen & Rossi incorporated a central theme into their acts which guaranteed laughter from the audience: an ability to exploit and use to their ultimate advantage the hilarity of contrasting personalities.
Allen & Rossi, active from 1957–1968 but reunited numerous times throughout the next three decades, appeared on more than 700 television shows. Forty-four times they performed on “Ed Sullivan.” The pair were regulars on “The Tonight Show” and “The Merv Griffin Show” among others and were staples on the casino and nightclub circuit. They recorded 16 comedy albums, made it to Hollywood ‘starring’ in a spy spoof film entitled, The Last of the Secret Agents (1966) — fittingly their first and last effort in a futile attempt to make it to the Walk of Fame — and were rewarded with their own TV special. They toured for three years with Nat King Cole — who had originally suggested the two work together — and were regulars on his TV show. All this from a duo reflective of the era and focused on the simple and easy laugh. Allen himself conceded that the origin of his famous, “Hello dere!” could be traced to nothing other than a brain cramp. “We were into the act and I just went blank…and I looked at Steve and said, ‘Hello dere…hello dere.’ Then suddenly everyone in the club was saying it — hello dere.” Fortuitous perhaps but somehow everlasting. And popular enough to allow the two to share a stage with a Who’s Who of that generation’s show business royalty such as Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne and Elvis Presley.
During the 1964 presidential campaign Allen portrayed the ultra-conservative Republican Barry Goldwater, in a routine. He began the standard interview with Rossi exhibiting no interest in imitating candidate Goldwater’s inflection or tone of voice and said, “Hello dere!” Then he declared his [Goldwater’s] confidence that he could win “all 13 states.” “The Hollywood Squares,” “Password” and an occasional movie and television role in both dramas and comedies followed. (A role in daytime television’s “The Big Valley” as a character by the name of Waldo Diefendorfer, a hapless ranch hand spreading bad luck like manure, springs to mind).
“Everyone remembers those shows with The Beatles, and they were great, but we appeared on all the shows,” Allen recalled in 2014. “There wasn’t a talk show on TV that didn’t want Allen & Rossi.” Second wife, singer-songwriter Karon Kate Blackwell whom Allen married in 1984 became his performing partner and the two launched a musical comedy act which toured the country. They landed gigs at the Gold Coast Hotel and Casino, the Southpoint Casino and Palace Station among other locales and played right through the new millennium, with sell-out shows as late as 2015. A new generation had grown to love his old-school humor. Even Allen himself expressed incredulity at his remarkable run. “It’s unbelievable to be 94 years old,” he told a New York audience in 2016. “My wife says, ‘What do you want for your birthday?’ I told her, ‘an antique.’ So she framed my birth certificate.”
Marty Allen died on February 12, 2018. He was six weeks shy of his ninety-sixth birthday.
